A Hard Day's Night

Part 3 - Release and Reception

With shooting completed by the end of April 1964, the film received an intensive publicity campaign from United Artists, and under Lester's supervision a series of trailers were produced which, in the case of the European version, featured an exclusive appearance from the group absurdly addressing audiences from prams! However, despite territorial variations, the central marketing theme of both trailers and publicity posters was, unsurprisingly, the band's music, and both British and American publicity proudly announced the forthcoming appearance of the seven new songs and included advertisements for the soundtrack album, whose cover cleverly used the same typography as the film posters, creating a kind of corporate ‘package.’ The company also went to great lengths to ensure that the film received high-profile openings, particularly in America, where they organized free buses, food and security for fan-club members to generate media interest by camping outside the doors of the cinema the night before the premiere. In Britain, the film’s release was even more of a ‘media event.’ On 6 July the film was given a Royal Charity Premiere (in the presence of Princess Margaret) at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus. Twelve thousand Beatles fans turned up in the hope of catching a glimpse of their idols as they entered the cinema. These events garnered enormous publicity for the Beatles, and the tabloid papers ran cover and centre-page stories on the film’s opening with headlines such as ‘A Royal Shake for Ringo’ and ‘It's a Right Royal Riot of a Film’.41 The Beatles were, of course, already big celebrities in Britain, but the photographs depicting the group shaking hands with Princess Margaret added an extra dimension   of exoticism to their image. More importantly, they consolidated the royal ‘seal of approval’ which had initially been triggered by their Royal Command performance in 1963, making them the first pop group to win the public approval of ‘establishment’ figures.

If the publicity which surrounded the film made the Beatles' star shine even brighter, this was matched by the effect of the film itself. It garnered almost unanimously favourable reviews in both the broadsheet and tabloid press, with the highest praise coming from Daily Mirror critic Dick Richards, who stated that ‘what could have been simply a money-making gimmick turns out as nimble entertainment in its own right. It's offbeat - and on the beat. It's a winner.’42 Film journals such as Sight and Sound, although slightly less generous, maintained, perhaps somewhat grudgingly, that the film ‘works ... on a level at which most British films, particularly the bigger and more pretentious, don’t manage to get going at all.'43 Furthermore, the film’s positive critical reception was not restricted to the press, and both George Martin and Alun Owen won Academy Award nominations for their efforts with soundtrack and script.

With the combination of fever-pitch Beatlemania and favourable reviews, a film which was initially financed for soundtrack material became an enormous international box-office success in its own right, taking $1.3 million in its first week of American release, and eventually grossing $11 million worldwide.44 Needless to say, the accompanying soundtrack material also sold extraordinarily well, the British album retaining a number one position for twenty-one weeks and the title-track single for three weeks. A tie-in novelization of Owen’s screenplay (complete with eight pages of stills from the film) by John Burke also sold well on both sides of the Atlantic. The profits didn’t stop there. Three years later, the film was sold to the American television network, NBC, for £1.5 million,45 a very considerable figure for the sixties.

The film’s success affected the Beatles’ career in a number of significant ways. First, it helped to consolidate their appeal to a teenage audience. Conversely, however, it also helped to develop and expand their appeal beyond that of contemporary youth and there were a number of factors which contributed to this. The form and ideology of the film appealed more to the aesthetic tastes of an adult audience than any previous pop movie. Fortunately for the Beatles, this was recognized by the media, and while the royal associations of the premiere helped to consolidate and legitimize the group’s appeal to a more middle-aged audience, positive reviews in such ‘highbrow’ papers as the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph also helped to boost their cultural credibility with more middle-class and intellectual factions than they had previously been afforded, winning over remaining ‘non-believers’.46 While this kind of ‘intellectual’ media treatment wasn’t totally new to the Beatles as a recording outfit (a year earlier the Sunday Times had declared Lennon and McCartney the ‘outstanding English composers of 1963’ and compared their chord progressions to the music of Mahler47), the film and its criticism also helped to transform them from a ‘faceless’ recording group into an act which comprised four separate ‘personalities’. This was particularly true of American audiences and, as Roger Ebert claims, ‘After that movie was released everybody knew the names of all four Beatles ... everybody.’48 In short, the crossover into film helped to furnish the Beatles with a total mass appeal hitherto unprecedented in pop. Moreover, this had been achieved without sacrificing a shred of credibility within the ranks of their original audience, a rare feat indeed.

On a more personal level, the film marked the beginning of a longstanding professional friendship with Victor Spinetti, who was to go on to appear in the group's next two film projects, and to co-adapt Lennon's books, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965), for the stage in 1968. As he recalls, ‘When we met it was as If we’d known each other all of our lives, it was just one of those things... There was no sort of a wall…I just loved them.’49 The film also provided the circumstance for George Harrison’s first meeting with Patti Boyd, who was working as a bit-part actress (she can be seen playing a schoolgirl in the train sequences). Harrison went on to marry Boyd in early 1966, and although they later divorced (Boyd famously married Harrison’s guitarist friend Eric Clapton in the seventies), she was responsible for introducing Harrison to the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru whose philosophies became of vital importance to the Beatles’own ideas in 1967/68.
Despite the critical and economic success of A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles remained impassive about their film career, and were modest about their abilities as actors. Shortly after the film was released Lennon was asked if the public could look forward to more Beatles movies. ‘There'll be more,’ came the reply, ‘but I don't know whether you can look forward to them or not.’50

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008