The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night is an eternally fresh delight of a film – and it is also somehow sixty years old today.
A Hard Day’s Night – The Beatles’ feature film debut – hit UK cinemas sixty years ago today, on Monday 6 July 2024.
This film has always felt and will always feel as fresh as tomorrow. Just as the wonderful Errol Flynn film The Adventures of Robin Hood did in 1938, A Hard Day’s Night moves at a relentless pace that feels decades ahead of its time.
A Hard Day’s Night has the secret of eternal youth. It crackles and buzzes with a frenetic energy and wit. It abounds with an exuberant joy that refuses to age. I can only imagine how exhilarating this film must have felt on its first release in 1964.
I’m not sure when I first saw it. But it feels like a film that has always been there for me, and one which always, always brings a smile to my face and improves my mood (whether it needed improving in the first place or not).
My most recent viewing of it was last weekend, when the BBC showed it on Saturday 30 June 2024. I only meant to watch the opening scene… but as always seems to happen, I couldn’t tear myself way, and had to bask in the whole lovely film. I hope to repeat this many more times in future.
My most memorable viewing of A Hard Day’s Night was at a special screening at the BFI Southbank cinema in London on Thursday July 2014, to mark its 50th anniversary. The screening was preceded by a lengthy interview with the film’s director Richard Lester, conducted by Mark Lewisohn. I wrote it in one of the earliest posts on this blog: The flash in the Beatles biographer’s eye. I wrote the following about Mr Lewisohn in that 2014 post:
Mark Lewisohn, self-described as “the world’s only professional Beatles historian.” Lewisohn is engaged in penning a three-volume Beatles biography entitled All These Years, which invites the adjective “monumental.” Only one volume has thus far been released. The ‘regular’ edition weighs in at 960 pages, the special expanded edition at 1,728 pages.
Cut to today, and volume two of All These Years (which it would seem safe to guess will be entitled Turn On, what with volume one being Tune In) is still not yet with us. Mark Lewisohn’s website assures us that he is hard at work on this even-more-epic second volume, stating:
“IT WON’T BE OUT THIS YEAR. The book IS happening. The book entails a lot of work.”
It is a racing certainty that the second volume of Lewisohn’s Beatles biography will cover A Hard Day’s Night. On that night at the BFI a decade back, Lester let slip a morsel of information that I think highly probable to make it into All These Years volume two:
I got to see the flash in the Beatles biographer’s eye. Lewisohn’s smooth and thoughtful professionalism was overtaken for a fleeting moment by the thrill of the hunt, as Lester let slip a tiny Beatles fact that would otherwise have been lost to history.
Mr Lewisohn remarked how odd it was that the Beatles were the seventh act to have gone from recording with George Martin to making films with Richard Lester (can’t remember all the other six, but they included Peter Sellers, Clive Dunn and the Temperance Seven). Lester replied with words to the following effect: “And the funny thing was, I’d never met George Martin at that point.”
The world’s only professional Beatles historian was clearly taken aback by this comment, leaning in with a delighted, momentary “How did I not know that before?” look as his picture of the Beatles got that tiny bit more vivid. This is what he lives for.
I will conclude this post with the closing words from my 2014 blog post, which remain true today:
Make your own life that little bit better: please do watch A Hard Day’s Night at your next opportunity.
May you be nothing but kind today, to yourself and to others.
May today be nothing but kind to you and yours.
IMAGES
- Kinema-Junpo-1964-August-early-2 via Wikimedia Commons.
- The Beatles arrive at JFK Airport via Wikimedia Commons.
- Beatles at Cleveland Public Hall September 15th 1964 via Wikimedia Commons.
MJCarty 
