A Hard Day's Night

Part 2 - Analysis

Yet despite the speed and frugality of its production A Hard Day's Night remains, for many writers and film critics, the most accomplished and important pop musical in film history. It was described by Andrew Sarris as the 'Citizen Kane of juke box movies’17 and American critic Roger Ebert has commented that he would have no hesitation in placing it in the top five musicals of all time.18 Twenty-three years after its release, a poll conducted by Beatles Monthly Book revealed it to be the most popular film release amongst fans, polling twice as many votes as Help!, the runner-up.19 While it is not my intention to enter into puerile debate about what should constitute a film's ‘classic’ status, it seems that the underlying reason for the film's critical reverence rests with the originality and complexity of its stylistic and ideological properties, properties which were conspicuously absent from previous pop films. With A Hard Day's Night, the pop musical ‘came of age’, making the vehicles of Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley seem, like their music, to be hopelessly naive and outdated.

The formal style of the film was vastly different from that of the Beatles’ contemporaries, both in its extraordinary eclecticism and in its daring rejection of traditional Hollywood aesthetics. Unlike the vehicles of Tommy Steele and the later musicals of Cliff Richard, A Hard Day's Night was not hell-bent on merely imitating the conventional narrative structure and film style of the Hollywood musical. Instead it opted for a reactionary, and seemingly self-conscious amalgamation of formal techniques derived from a range of British and European genres. But what were these techniques, from which genres were they derived, and how did they fit into the overall structure of the narrative?

Perhaps the most striking formal difference between the film and its predecessors  is  its  illusion of documentary-style  realism, which  is achieved in a number of ways. From the outset, the notion of producing a film based on real characters set within (for the Beatles) realistic situations goes against the artificiality of, say, the Elvis cycle, in which Presley plays fictitious characters in overtly contrived scenarios. Although clearly ‘acting’, the group effectively play themselves in a narrative which, despite its fictionalized plot, accurately depicts a slice of their chaotic routine at the height of Beatlemania. As Owen stated in an interview with Alexander Walker, ‘What Shenson and I want to avoid is a "slick" movie; a rough-cast look is the aim, a documentary feel. This may seem apostasy but I want a film that can stand on its own without the Beatles.’20

In keeping with this realist aesthetic are many of Lester's formal techniques, which are culled from a number of different realist genres, most notably drama-documentary and ‘direct cinema’ documentary. Indeed, despite his use of breakneck editing (possibly derived from his advertising background), the regular use of real locations, hand-held sequences and naturalistic lighting frequently imbue the action with a sense of overpowering actuality which, at times, becomes so stylistically similar to documentary or newsreel footage that it becomes impossible to differentiate fact from fiction. The opening ‘chase’ sequence, for example, is, although dramatized, formally consistent with con­temporary direct cinema, its grainy black-and-white transparency and hand-held camerawork making it almost indistinguishable from the Maysles Brothers’ documentary film of the group in America, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah (1964).21 In a similar manner, Owen's script, based on direct observation and populated by Spoonerisms, colloquialisms and Liverpool slang, lends the action such a unique sense of naturalism that it also creates a convincing illusion of actuality (or at least improvisation), despite the fact that only a minimal number of genuinely ‘ad-libbed’ lines were employed in the final cut. Asked about the number of improvisations, cast member Victor Spinetti remembers that ‘there were a hell of a lot, but they were all cut out. We kept to the script. They [the Beatles] didn't!’22

While realism had, of course, already been absorbed into commercial British film style through New Wave ‘kitchen sink’ dramas such as A Kind of Loving (1962) and This Sporting Life (1963), A Hard Day's Night was undoubtedly the first pop musical to adopt this aesthetic so freely and wholeheartedly into its discourse. The self-conscious integration of such realist devices might alone be enough to lend the film a sense of ‘originality’  and thus attract a measure of critical reverence. But what gives A Hard Day's Night its enduring freshness is that it is ultimately a cinematic bastard, born of a number of different and often aesthetically opposing sensibilities, skilfully pulled together by its creators into a seamless ‘whole’. Quite apart from its documentary elements, the formal style of the narrative is, by the director’s own admission, heavily influenced by the French nouvelle vague.23 Lester's fondness for hand-held sequences and real locations are properties which can also be attributed to films such as Godard's A Bout de Souffle (1959), and the film’s meandering narrative style seems heavily imbued with a New Wave sensibility. Although it would be misleading  to suggest that the film completely lacks a classically motivated cause-effect chain (the slight story revolves around Lennon, Harrison and McCartney finding their missing drummer and getting back to the television studio in time to record their live show), the narrative embraces sequences which do nothing to advance the plot, and the group often seems merely to ‘exist’ within a series of episodic situations rather than to act as highly motivated, goal-oriented protagonists. Indeed, while it would be unfair to suggest that the Beatles are presented as unmotivated, it is certainly true that, like the heroes of an early Godard or Truffaut movie, they often tend to ‘drift aimlessly’, and ‘engage in actions on the spur of the moment’.24 The scene in which Harrison passively saunters into the production office of a patronizing fashion hipster (played  by Kenneth Haigh and allegedly based on magazine editor Marc Boxer25) illustrates this perfectly, his conversation with the fashion boss serving no narrative purpose whatsoever. I shall discuss later the purpose that it does serve, but it is important to acknowledge that Lester and Owen’s narrative construction and pacing is, in effect (if not intention), closer to that of the French New Wave than to any previous British or American pop musical.

However, while there is no mistaking Lester’ employment of distinctly eclectic realist techniques, the viewer’s ability to perceive the action through a singularly realist aesthetic is constantly destabilized by the invasion of humorous surreal sequences and ‘moments’ which constantly,  yet  unexpectedly,  hijack  the  illusion of actuality arid ‘surprise’ the audience. For example, following their disagreement with a haughty bureaucrat in the train compartment, the Beatles inexplicably appear outside the moving train, pulling faces and taunting him with the immortal schoolboy cliche, ‘Hey, Mister, can we have our ball back?’5 In a similar manner, the invasion of fast and slow motion action sequences, although obviously not intrinsically surrealist, imbues the text with all the gratuitous anti-logic of surrealism, and thus serves an identical aesthetic purpose. Such is the case in the park sequence (which seems highly reminiscent of Lester's own Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film), where the group's antics are framed from self-­consciously unconventional  angles and at exaggeratedly artificial speeds. While it would be an overstatement to suggest that the use of such playful ‘intrusions’ into realism were original (one only has to study the early films of the French New Wave to disprove this), they were certainly new to the pop musical and, while common to the early films of Godard and Truffaut, could also have evolved from Lester’s affection for the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, with whom  the director was later to work. Moreover, it is possible that Lester’'s avant-garde sensibilities influenced some of the film's groundbreaking musical sequences, in which pop music was employed in a remarkably original capacity.

Prior to A Hard Day's Night, the majority of British and American pop musicals had relied upon the long established tradition of song performance derived from the classical Hollywood musical. Indeed, in the vehicles of Presley and Richard the genre’s central musical sequences were based on the lip-synched performance of songs by a solo singer or group which, occasionally combined with minimal onscreen backing sources (for example, in the case of the Presley cycle, his guitar), essentially attempted to articulate the illusion of ‘real’ authentic, diegetic, performance. While such performances were traditionally, and obviously necessarily, accompanied by non-diegetic background music (the 'unseen' musical accompaniment), the underlying importance of this formal aesthetic was to reproduce an illusory spectacle of ‘genuine’ performance, the key factor being the audience’s belief that the stars’ performances were authentic. However, Lester's partial employment of a humorous surrealism (and its resulting disposal of the conventionally ‘realist’ aesthetic) meant that it was no longer necessary, or, for that matter, uniformly desirable, to interpret the central musical numbers via conventionally representational sequences of performers miming to a backing track and pretending to play instruments. A Hard Day's Night is arguably the first film of its kind to stage central musical numbers which are not tied to performance.

While this approach is employed in the film's opening ‘chase’ sequence, it is also evident from the very first real musical number, ‘I Should Have Known Better’, where the first few verses of the song are accompanied by footage of the group playing cards in the baggage car of the train. Indeed, as with the film’s non-musical sequences, Lester was keen to break with uniform performance realism as early into the film as possible in order to ‘establish the principle that there would not just be realism’.26 However, the most pronounced example of this anti-realism can be seen towards the film’s closure, where ‘Can't Buy Me Love’ is used to accompany a sequence in which, freed from the confinements of their celebrity, the group cavort in a park. In this way, Lester’s film freed the representation of the musical number from its traditional generic slavery; he allowed the pop song the opportunity to work in a similar manner to conventional incidental music, as an abstract entity capable of punctuating action which is not performance-oriented. While this move was evidently prompted by a surrealist aesthetic, it ultimately owes more to the director’s need to convey the emotion inherent in the Beatles’ songs; while the surrealist aesthetic made such sequences ‘possible’, what made them desirable was Lester's feeling that performance was not necessarily adequate to convey meaning on an emotional level. Although he accepts that the film was the first pop musical to break with performance-oriented musical numbers, the director is quick to stress that the form of the musical sequences was ultimately a by-product of a desire to convey emotion. Lester modestly explains: ‘I don't think one ever sits down and says, “I'm going to do something which will change the face of musical history, and will be known in ten years time as MTV”... You don't do it for those reasons, you do it because you think “what do you need?” [emotionally] at this point.’27

Even when the musical sequences are performance oriented, Lester ensures that they are shot with a more formally adventurous and self-consciously ‘cinematic’ style than had previously been seen within the genre or on such contemporaneous performance-based television shows as Top of the Pops (1964) or Top Beat (1964). Here, group-based studio performances were shot in a largely ‘passive’ and rather ‘flat’, unpoetic manner, filmed statically from front and side (from perhaps two or three angles) and with most emphasis uponvocal performance, rather than instrumentation, as the central diegetic source. The performances in Lester’s film are different. They seem deliberately to break with these conventions,  and the group's  musical renderings  are  shot from a multiplicity of angles (from above, behind, sideways and front) and camera movements, with extraordinarily fast-paced editing (which, in the finale, marries group footage with close-ups of screaming girls in the audience) and in a style which does not prioritize the singer above the instrumentation of the group as a whole. While such techniques differentiated the film from television aesthetics (it wouldn’t have made commercial sense merely to ape television techniques), the  formal experimentalism also echoes a ‘playfulness’ similar to the French New Wave. While it would be impossible to argue that these sequences ‘liberated’ pop aesthetics to the same degree as Lester’s use of non-performance-based musical sequences, they did, as we will discuss in the final  chapter,  exert  substantial influence  on  subsequent  film  and television productions.

Besides its groundbreaking form, it would also be fair to say that the film broke with a number of the ideological conventions of its genre, not least in its illusory rejection of an overtly paternalistic moral code. Where musicals such as The Young Ones (1961) were simple-minded morality tales in which a fictitious conflict between youth and age is resolved by mutual understanding and co-operation, A Hard Day's Night refused such a simplistic and contrived scenario, preferring instead to allow the audience an insight into their (albeit constructed) ‘real’ lives. Ultimately, it does promote inter-generational co-operation (the group work together to protect Paul's grandfather from danger and eventually conform to the needs of their television producer), but the film avoids the transparent moral excesses of the Cliff Richard cycle by its attachment to the illusion of realism and its resulting avoidance of stereotypical characters. While earlier films, most notably Expresso Bongo, had attempted to depict the inner mechanisms of the pop industry, the world which the Beatles inhabit in A Hard Day's Night is vastly different. The film refuses to succumb to the temptation of employing the ‘conniving manager’ stereotypes which peopled such movies, employing instead characters who exist outside traditional generic conventions. Indeed, while the group’s manager, Norm (Norman Rossington), is presented as honest and practical (if a little bossy), Paul's trouble-stirring grandfather (Wilfred Brambell) is depicted as something of a senile delinquent, a self-conscious reversal of traditional stereotyping.

In this way, the film not only refuses to patronize its audience, it actually privileges it into a position of ‘fly on the wall’ voyeurism which, until this point, it had seldom been offered. The audience is allowed to see a pop group in intimate, ‘behind-the-scenes’ scenarios which are essentially ‘real’, or at least, realistic. In short, it works on the principle that ‘truth’ is more interesting (if not stranger) than ‘fiction’, and that the Beatles, and the newly emerging phenomenon of Beatlemania, were of greater interest to the audience than anything that could be dreamed up by a film-maker. Ultimately, it enabled the audience to leave the cinema feeling that they had come to ‘know’ (and love) the group as ‘real’ people, rather than that they had merely been ‘entertained’ by a pop group acting out a totally fictitious plot. The manner in which Lester and Owen fashioned the group's screen image into a presentation which was to become a turning point for both the Beatles’ career and the pop film generally is worthy of further investigation.

Alexander Walker, in his book Hollywood, England, claims that A Hard Day's Night was instrumental in altering the public’s perception of the Beatles as a largely teenage phenomenon into 'the pantheon of family favourites’.28 Whatever the validity of this notion (and I think he’s probably right), it would certainly be true to say that the film attempted to present audiences with a different and more complex breed of pop star than had previously been seen in Britain or America. If the film’s stylistic cine-literacy and ideological complexity attempted to extend the genre's appeal beyond that of a teenage audience, so Owen and Lester refashioned the Beatles’ image to the same end. In keeping with the film's realist aspirations, they attempted to achieve this by opting to build on the proven success of the group's pre-existing image, which had recently started to capture more mature imaginations. But what were the ingredients that constituted the pre-existing image that the film sells to its audience, and how is this achieved?

The first ingredient was humour. Even before the film was made, the group had justifiably won an international reputation for its offbeat humour and quick-witted repartee with the media, whose questions they frequently pirhana'd with a cutting yet affable humour and, at times, a  simple  profundity. Indeed, as Richard Buskin notes,  this ingredient  was vital to their conquest of America, where their unrehearsed responses to a bombardment of questions as they touched down at Kennedy Airport ‘managed instantly to win the hearts of the US press and public’29 even before they had performed any music in the country. Owen’s script builds on this quality by playing on the group's comic strengths, depicting them as exaggeratedly sharp-witted characters who possess an idiosyncratic talent for acidic quipping and verbal punning. The film sets up situations in which these talents can be exploited to the full, as in the press conference sequence (possibly a reconstruction of the American conferences which took place a few weeks earlier) in which the group devise extraordinarily deft responses to the puerile questioning of the media. When asked ‘How do you find America?’, Lennon replies, ‘Turn left at Greenland.’ Asked whether he's a mod or a rocker, Ringo explains that he’s a ‘mocker’5. In this way, the film depicts the Beatles as capable of a range of complex wit that is by turns surrealist, sardonic, sarcastic and matter-of-fact, providing ‘something for everybody’ regardless of humorous disposition, and exploiting an ingredient of their popularity which could not (for a ‘serious’ act)  be so easily incorporated into their recordings.

The second ingredient, at least as far as British audiences were concerned, was working-class provincialism. According to Buskin, an important factor in the Beatlemania phenomenon was the fact that the group were ‘four ordinary boys next door’ who were ‘living out a fantasy on behalf of everyone else’.30 In a country whose popular culture had mostly been dominated by imported talent, the domestic success, let alone the international export, of any British group was a rare and welcome phenomenon. The group’s unselfconscious projection of themselves as ‘ordinary’ and largely ‘unaffected’ working-class boys further endeared them to the grassroots ‘underdog’ sympathies of the British public and popular press, who, in their patriotic stories of the group’s fame, wealth and international ‘conquests’, upheld them as symbols of the new social mobility and ‘classlessness’ of sixties Britain.31 These sympathies were further compounded by the ‘ordinariness’ of the Group’s provincialism (which at the time was also partly paradoxically ‘exotic,’ since few popular acts had heralded from outside London), and the group were often presented in the press as ‘just four boys from Liverpool’,32 adding fuel to the irresistible entrepreneurial dream that ‘you don't have to be a middle-class Londoner to make it - anybody can do it.’

Like an article from a daily tabloid, the film panders to this aspect of the Beatles’ successful image, portraying them as unaffected working-class boys who have ‘made good’ in a middle-class world through a combination of hard work and ability, whilst retaining the ‘ordinariness’ of their roots. Owen’s script cleverly exploits this element of the Beatles’ appeal, peppering their dialogue with ‘hip’ working-class expressions (‘gear!’), colloquialisms and Liverpool slang (the expression ‘grotty’, which Lennon believed to have been invented by Owen, was in fact a Liverpudlian expression for ‘grotesque’33). In some ways, this ‘unashamed’ presentation of working-class provincialism was very much in keeping with the new spirit of social realism which was beginning, through television dramas such as Coronation Street (which began in 1960) and the ‘kitchen sink’ films cited earlier, to become increasingly concerned with the authentic depiction of ‘characters who really did breathe the essence of working-class existence’.34 However, this is perhaps where the comparison ends. The Beatles are ultimately presented as the optimistic and successful antithesis of the angst-ridden, trapped characters of a Lindsay Anderson drama, and the world they inhabit is, by ideological necessity, almost uniformly middle-class. Nevertheless, if their presentation can largely be regarded as a factually oriented advertisement for social mobility, the group are, at times, conversely depicted as being at least partly distrustful of the environment which they inhabit, and are quick to mock the professional insincerity and transparent pretentiousness of both the middle-class television director and the professional trendsetter, whose patronizing spiel about manufacturing fashions George swiftly debunks. Moreover, the Beatles are positively presented as the antithesis of these unsavoury characters, and Owen's script plays upon the ‘authenticity’ and unpretentiousness of the group’s ‘unaffected’ outlook on life. Although the film presents them as ‘prisoners’ of their own extraordinary celebrity, their generally affable attitude towards others is constantly shown to be unchanged by fame and wealth.

The final ingredient of the Beatles' image which Owen and Lester adapt is that of individualism. Although their famous Pierre Cardin suits and 'mop-top' haircuts symbolize and affirm a group identity, the film goes to great lengths to ensure that each Beatle is ascribed an individual personality. Indeed, although Owen could be accused of characterizing the Beatles with what Peter Brown and Steven Gaines describe as ‘cartoon strokes’,35 the screenplay sometimes seems hell-bent on reassuring the audience that the Beatles are not a ‘four-headed monster’,36 but a group composed of individuals with their own special character traits. As Lester explains, ‘What we concentrated on was to extend, to overplay the differences in their personalities to artificially create separation.’37

This notion of individuality had, by 1964, already become integral to the Beatles’ early success with the media, their widespread appeal deriving partly from the fact that each member appealed more strongly to different factions of their audience. Lennon and Harrison’s intelligence and cynical sarcasm appealed mainly to the older, predominantly male fan, McCartney’s boyish charm and more ‘conventional’ handsomeness to teenage girls, and Ringo’s  affable, goofy humour and vulnerable ‘ugliness’ to almost everybody else. To this end, the film allows each member an exclusive scene in which to exhibit and thus reaffirm the individual character traits which were, through television, radio and newspaper interviews, becoming a hallmark of the Beatles' media image: Ringo has his solo spot as he wanders sadly around in nowhere-land, John deflates a misguided make-up girl on the studio stairs, and George ridicules the glib London trendsetter. Only McCartney misses out on a solo scene, although this was not intentional. A sequence for McCartney (involving a humorous conversation between him and a Shakespearean actress) was shot, but was later discarded. However, the reason for its absence was not, as some writers have maintained, McCartney’s performance. As Lester remembers, ‘The scene looked lovely ... and there was nothing wrong with it. The general impression was that Paul couldn't do it because he didn’t act it very well. That wasn't the case. What it was is by definition a very languid and gentle scene and there was no place for it when we put the film together.’38

Although care was taken to present the group as four individuals, it was also recognized by the film's creators that it was important for the  group’s female following that the Beatles should not be perceived as being romantically involved. At the heart of the female hysteria which the monster of Beatlemania fed upon was the fantasy that the ‘boys-next-door’ were ‘available’ and eligible bachelors, and A Hard Day's Night avoided wrecking the myth. As Lester maintains, ‘It was an instinctive thing that fans would be quite happy with them as four available people as opposed to, I suppose, the Elvis Presley pictures, where there was always a love interest.’39

In line with the notion of individualism is Lester's presentation of the musical performance sequences which, as well as showcasing the group’s established musical versatility (Latin ballads such as ‘And I Love Her’ are set against rock and roll numbers such as ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’), democratically allow each member of the group the opportunity to display his vocal ability. The group’s major vocalists (Lennon, Harrison and McCartney) are all seen performing numbers on which they take the lead vocal. Although Harrison gets only one vocal performance (I’m Happy Just to Dance with You’), this strategy is in keeping with the Beatles' previous two British albums, Please Please Me (1963) and With the Beatles (1963), where he is allotted one and two vocal slots respectively. The one inconsistency is the absence of a Ringo Starr vocal, although this is to some degree offset by the fact that ‘I Wanna Be Your Man,’ a popular track from the group's previous album,40 is heard in the disco sequence at the nightclub. Indeed, while the film employs seven new songs, a number of older Beatles numbers are used on the soundtrack. These are the aforementioned Ringo song, Harrison’s ‘Don't Bother Me’, ‘She Loves You’, their biggest contemporary hit, and an orchestral rendition of a hitherto obscure Beatles B-side, 'This Boy', arranged and performed by the George Martin Orchestra and employed as incidental music. The inclusion of this material both supports the film’s tendency to build on the group’s existing popularity (relieving the audience of having to accustom itself to totally new material) and allows the film to work as an advertisement for other Beatles releases as well as the official soundtrack album.

Continued... A Hard Day's Night: Part three

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008