Cold opens work best when a strum of the guitar strikes through as it does for A Hard Day’s Night. No wonder the album made the same choice. Start as you mean to go on. For The Beatles, that meant opening with the eponymous track of their album, and this, the movie to go along with it. Considering the quality founded on A Hard Day’s Night, it is surreal to think it was a soundtrack. Quality like that is hard to come by, but The Beatles frequently pursued that blur of incredulous, boundary-pushing works just for the sake of it. Beatlemania was in full swing, and that much is captured by the sprinting Fab Four first featured in this comedy masterclass.
For all the jovial fun and the quick as a flash one-liners, there does appear to be a great deal of detail on how The Beatles would have to navigate their comings and goings. Black cabs and hidden trains, their pursuit was as terrifying as it was expected. It soon devolves from there; its vignette style takes a day in the life of The Beatles. That wasn’t a pun, honest. A Hard Day’s Night is the original music video, popularised decades later by MTV. The Beatles were trendsetters and much of the humour, inferences and expressions from the four throughout this feature cements that. Paul McCartney plays up a strange and comical back and forth with his on-screen grandfather, portrayed by Wilfrid Brambell. Ringo Starr is rightly arrested, with plenty of puns about the size of his nose and the nothingness of the drummer in the average band, those jokes are particularly fun and quite on the nose in the expressive way A Hard Day’s Night finds itself dealing with.
Holding that together for a feature-length exploration of The Beatles is far more difficult than director Richard Lester lets on. John Lennon pursuing the sex appeal of The Beatles while George Harrison mulls around, offering fashion tips and being as elusive as he was in the latter days of the band, it all feels to be of great quality. Those sleight of hand, on-screen moments are the clear creativity. From Lennon in the tub to McCartney with a false beard, those little moments are of real quality. Smart writing that feels fast and fun and free, a representation of The Beatles that showcases their talents not just for music but for their abilities as performers. Starr has some trouble giving out a convincing laugh, but at least he is giving it a go. All of them are.
A Hard Day’s Night is the first in a long line of The Beatles on-screen appearances. It is also the best. Some of the more nonsensical moments, those lines of dialogue that break the pace once again, are of the highest quality and order. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr appear to enjoy, most of all, their ability to make the ridiculous seem quaint. They are interesting leads because they have the star power of the time. From Ringo making friends with delinquents throwing tyres to Lennon persuading women he does, in fact, look nothing like Lennon. A threadbare narrative is more than enough to hold all of these punchlines and gags together, although not all of them hit as well as they should.
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