Stars: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Wilfrid Brambell, Derek Nimmo, Victor Spinetti, Norman Rossington, Lionel Blair

Director: Richard Lester

Summary: Highly acclaimed film made in the heyday of the Beatles musical career. The four lads from Liverpool are set to take on the world.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT presents a fictionalized day in the life of The Beatles as they give a performance on a live television show. Filmed just a month after their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, this film introduces us to the unique personalities of each member of the Beatles. The film opens with the band boarding a train mobbed with adoring young fans (mostly women) as they attempt to travel to the television studio in London. The antics of the band during rehearsals and makeup application provide a large part of the comic material in this feature, though there are other moments of pure hilarity. The unscripted vignette featuring a hangover-suffering Ringo is especially funny, particularly when he is arrested and risks having to miss the live television broadcast. None of this goes unnoticed by the director of the show, played by Victor Spinetti, a recurring cast member in Beatles movies. As the clock ticks away dramatically, our heroes manage to free Ringo from jail and sneak onto the stage in the nick of time, delighted in the knowledge that they have nearly driven the director mad in the process. Arguably the first music video ever made, this faux documentary and its shooting style have been a tremendous influence on nearly every rock and roll feature since.

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A Hard Day's Nightmay have been the Beatles' first big-screen experience but, as they had become the biggest band in the world by the time of its production, the Moptops were able to ensure it was a bit different from the band-movie norm. "We'd made it clear that we weren't interested in being stuck in one of those nobody-understands-our-music plots," John Lennon would later recall, "The kind of thing where we'd just pop up a couple of times between the action, all smiles and clean shirts, to sing our latest record."

Instead the quartet recruited a young director named Richard Lester--who had previously worked with the Fab Four's beloved Goons--to make a movie that followed them as they enjoyed and endured the phenomenon that was Beatlemania. "The film wrote itself right in front of our eyes," says Lester. "We just took the dirty bits and cut them out." The result is a frenetic hour and a half inside the Beatles' personal space as they engage in all manner of surreal hijinks--more often than not involving Paul's "grandfather" (played by Steptoe and Son's Wilfrid Brambell) while dodging the ever-present horde of screaming fans. Although the result now seems a little dated, there remains an almost heartbreakingly good-natured aura around the foursome's naïve performances, while few could argue about the quality of a soundtrack that includes "Can't Buy Me Love", "And I Love Her" and "A Hard Day's Night" itself, to name but a few. Whether the film would have been quite so successful if Lester had followed McCartney's suggestion and called it "Oh, What a Lovely Wart!" will, sadly, never be known. --Clark Collis

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Things They Said Today The Original Documentary, Their Production Will Be Second To None Filmmaker Interviews, With The Beatles The Cast, Working Like A Dog The Production Crew, Busy Working Overtime Post Production Crew, Listen To The Music Playing In Your H
Year:	1964
Release Date:	September 30, 2002
Runtime:	89 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	B E D 888493
Keywords:	Music, Night, Films, Two, Hard, Shows, Performing, Musicals, Discs, Arts, Day's
Genre:	Music/Performing Arts