Musicians in Movies: A Hard Day's Night (Dir Richard Lester, 1h27m, 1964)

The Beatles do not so much arrive in cinema as explode onto the scene. Their introduction, as the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" crashes into being, barely a year after the band's first album, and mere months after arriving on US shores to spread "Beatlemania" worldwide is nothing short of a rude awakening; the arrival of a generational force in another medium they would upend, with director Richard Lester, and scriptwriter Alun Owen in tow. The band are introduced, not in mannered style-compare, for example, the arrival of Elvis Presley in 1956's Love Me Tender, where he's essentially parachuted into a melodramatic Civil War Western - but introduced at full pelt. The Beatles have arrived. Rock cinema will never be the same. 

Covering 36 hours in the hectic life of the band; there's a cinema verité quality, not only from the fact that much of the mad dash from performance to interview to performance echoes the gruelling schedule of men barely out of their teens, but from the way the film looks and the length of the documentary-style shots. Although Lester himself has often played down the experimental quality of the film, from the black and white grainy footage that, either as cost-cutting measure or deliberate invocation of both the French New Wave - compare and contrast the gleeful chaos of Bande A Part's Louvre scene - and English kitchen sink drama - a scene later in which Harrison encounters an out of touch ad executive features an original Angry Young Man, Kenneth Haigh - outward, this is the arrival of a style that would influence music videos, and beyond.

Back to that crashing chord. Enter the band running-and George Harrison sprawling to the floor- from a horde of their fans, a manifestation both of the real-life screaming masses, and the manic energy that constitutes the next hour and a half of A Hard Day's Night. Again, the lines between reality and fantasy blur: these are real Beatles fans really chasing the real Beatles, their energy - and threat! - never far from the surface. As a document of peak Beatlemania, of the screaming teenage audiences that threaten to drown out the band with their excitement, in scenes that that border on sensory overload, it's the rival of any documentary footage. 

This, though, is only half the film, the cinematic recreation of, as one of the characters grumbles, the endless shuttling between "a train and a room, and a car and a room, and a room and a room".The other half is the Beatles themselves; you cannot help but compare the way that Alun's scripts define each of the Beatles in a couple of well-chosen attributes and the naturalistic sense of the film playing to the group's strengths and distinct characters to the utter hell of Elvis' 1960s production line film career. Though the group would find little in common with the older Alun, his time in Merseyside would allow his screenplay to capture the slang and energy of the city the Beatles came from, though Lester would have to battle United Artists in their attempts to dub the group for American audiences!

Alun's greatest introduction to the Beatles as a group is this character shorthand: even to those unfamiliar with the band, in 1964 and now, the four are easily identifiable, and these would remain in place for both Help and the Beatles' animated adventures in the US ABC cartoon, and Yellow Submarine. John is witty, sarcastic and gets some of the more outlandish visual comedy scenes of the film, Paul is charming - particularly in the scenes where the four of them have to content with their collective comedic foil, Wilfred Bramble' (better known to contemporary British audiences from BBC TV's Steptoe and Son)'s Grandfather McCartney. George is quietly spoken but sardonic, his best scene coming with Haigh's ad-exec who in decidedly metatextual fashion, tells him that he, not the young man before him, knows what the youth want, and Ringo. Oh, Ringo. 

Ringo, of all the Beatles, seems to be the one that comes closest to the standout star of these films, both his wide-eyed sojourn outside with mere minutes to spare before the band's performance, attempting, and ultimately failing, to find meaning outside the Beatles, and the centre of the band's second live action movie, Help!. It is as a unit, as the several musical numbers peppered throughout the film show, that the Beatles are at their strongest, and it is as a comedic troupe that the band create some of the best moments of the film. Lester, after all, would collaborate on The Goon Show alongside Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers; both would appear in the 1959 short, The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, a film popular with the Beatles, and especially Lennon. 

The anarchic sensibility that would win over Lennon and the rest of the group to the comedians continues here, the film drawing much of its humour from the slight bemusement of the group at their colossal fame, from inane interviewers, to an encounter between Lennon and a fan who cannot quite recognise who they're speaking to, not to mention the Beatles' rapport with Bramble and their mockery of the authority figures around them. Physical comedy ranges between the madcap energy, Lester leaning into almost every experimental trick in the book from under-cranked cameras to aerial shots, that imbues the "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence with so much charm, to the Max Sennett Keystone Cops-esque chase at the end of the film to rescue Ringo, before the band race onto their next engagement.

All of this, the reportage, the singularity of being The Beatles in 1964, the comedic back and forth between these thinly fictionalised version of the Fab Four, and their ribbing of the establishment, coalesce in A Hard Day's Night. Like many things the Beatles did, a cinematic outing is now derigeur for any up and coming would-be-megastar, from the Monkees' Head, an even more bizarre outing than either of the Beatles' movies, to the inevitable imitators, most notably Spice World (1997), in which Richard E Grant plays agent to the Spice Girls, and much of A Hard Day's Night's structure, if not its longevity, is lifted wholesale. It is a form often imitated, but never bettered, one of the great bands of the 20th Century exploding into a new medium and altering it forever.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

A Hard Day's Night is available via BluRay from Criterion and streaming from AppleTV

Next week, we're seeing double with Mick Jagger...and Mick Jagger, in Nicolas Roeg's gangster meets reclusive rockstar end of the 1960s comedown, Performance