A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Okay, it's The Beatles. Playing themselves. What's not to love? Made at the height of "Beatlemania", this comedy is a fictional take on "what being a Beatle is like", following John/Paul/George/Ringo as they dodge screaming fans and then rehearse for and perform on a British TV program before being whisked away to their next performance.…
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The Movie Crash Course
Okay, it’s The Beatles. Playing themselves. What’s not to love?

Made at the height of “Beatlemania”, this comedy is a fictional take on “what being a Beatle is like”, following John/Paul/George/Ringo as they dodge screaming fans and then rehearse for and perform on a British TV program before being whisked away to their next performance. Norman Rossington plays “Norm”, standing in for Brian Epstein as the Beatles’ manager, and John Junkin is “Shake”, their hapless road manager. Rounding out the main cast is comedian Wilfrid Brambell as “John McCartney”, Paul’s cantankerous (and fictional) grandfather.

The film tries to get some ongoing plot threads up and running. Grandpa McCartney is a bit of a troublemaker, and Paul is insistent that everyone take a turn “minding” him – but he’s always able to make his escape. The Beatles’ anarchic sensibility and haphazard sense of timing causes the TV show’s director (Vincent Spinetti) frequent headaches. And every so often Norm tries lecturing John about keeping the rest of the band under control; something that baffled me, since everyone in the band seemed to be acting up and it felt like a weirdly forced note. But otherwise the film is just an excuse to let The Beatles jump between singing some of their biggest hits and indulging in surrealist or satiric comedy sketches – Paul flirting with girls on a train, John enacting naval battles in a bathtub, George getting cornered by an ad executive, Ringo sneaking out to play hooky and bonding with some schoolkids on a similar adventure.

And fortunately, the creative team behind the film realized this was likely the best approach. Director Richard Lester was hand-picked by the band themselves; John in particular was a huge fan of Lester’s film Running Jumping Standing Still, a surrealist short he’d made with Peter Sellers. They similarly were fans of screenwriter Alun Owen – Owen’s 1959 play No Trains To Lime Street was set in Liverpool, and they felt he captured their hometown right. But Owen won them over even more by spending a few days just hanging around with them and shooting the breeze; some of the things they told him during their talks actually made it into the script, like when Grandpa McCartney complains that his trip with grandson Paul thus far has just been “a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room” – something Paul said the band’s typical tours felt like. Owen also used quips and jokes from actual Beatles press conferences for a similar scene in the film.

The admiration became mutual. Owen was a little more sympathetic, writing something that depicted the band as near prisoners to the machine of fame they’d been thrust into, while Lester came to appreciate their confidence and irreverence; they were unafraid of toppling some of Britain’s older institutions. “[Everything was] still based on privilege,” he recalled later; “privilege by schooling, privilege by birth, privilege by accent, privilege by speech. The Beatles were the first people to attack this… they said if you want something, do it. […] Forget all this talk about talent or ability or money or speech. Just do it.” Lester was also quick to come to the Beatles’ defense when a United Artists executive asked that The Beatles’ dialogue be dubbed in more “proper” English accents before the film was released stateside, sharing McCartney’s angry retort with them – “if we can understand a fucking cowboy talking Texan, they can understand us talking Liverpool!”

So basically this felt like a mind-meld of Monty Python with a Beatles concert. And that’s a poignant note for this Beatles fan…For yes, I am one. Like many in my generation, I first learned of them as a child, starting with their later works; my father owned most of their albums, and for reasons I’m unable to ascertain, he always selected Abbey Road as the dinner music when we enjoyed special family meals. (I’m probably the only person alive to associate the song Come Together with steak and potatoes.) One of the few albums he didn’t have was Let It Be, but that was okay – our neighbors across the street had it, and they had a better stereo anyway. The Yellow Submarine movie turned up as a TV movie when I was about eleven and caused a mild craze for me and my friends.

But I also shared a birthday with George Harrison, and so throughout my childhood my birthdays often began with hearing the local radio station play Here Comes the Sun in his honor. My church also used his song My Sweet Lord as a hymn once or twice (albeit with some lyrical editing). I followed his solo career as well, and read up more on George the man as I got older, learning more about his friendship and rivalry with the others. When I learned about his fondness for Monty Python, I started to see him as a kindred spirit.

Then I read a bit about why he was a Monty Python fan. Sometime during the band’s tense final days, George went home one night brooding about how it looked like The Beatles were soon going to dissolve. He turned on some television to distract himself…and found himself watching the very first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He later said it felt like The Beatles’ old spirit of fun and silliness and irreverence had somehow been transferred to the Pythons, and he was tremendously comforted; that spirit was still in the world somewhere. George watched Monty Python constantly, later saying that it “kept him sane” during the Beatles’ breakup, and later befriended many of the Python members. Since the Python members had themselves been inspired by Lester’s work, this isn’t too surprising; but George took so much comfort from that, he felt compelled to return the favor. (But that’s a story best left for when we get to the Python’s own films.)

But this film is a glimpse at that spirit of fun back when it was living with The Beatles. And again – what’s not to love?