A Hard Day’s Night at 60: how The Beatles made the movies pop

About halfway through A Hard Day’s Night (1964), George Harrison gets lost in a TV studio. He accidentally wanders into the marketing office, where he’s mistaken for an actor auditioning to be a teen fashion spokesperson – similar to what we’d now call an influencer. Every bit the ‘cool’ Beatle, George goes along with the pretence that he’s happy to be paid for his opinion, until the snooty ad executive reveals the catch: “Well, not your real opinion, naturally, it’ll be written out and you’ll learn it.”

Unwilling to compromise his authentic self for the sake of commerce, George calmly decimates the condescending ad-man’s attempts to appeal to teenagers, prompting him to have an existential panic and kick him out. “Get him out, he’s mocking the programme’s image!,” the ad-man cries. 

On its surface, this is a satire of advertising executives being out of touch with the changing mores of youth culture. But the scene is also a critique on the arbitrariness of trend cycles. Its denouement has the ad-man looking at a content calendar with relief as he realises “the change (in trends) isn’t due for three weeks yet.”

There’s a subtle nod to the transience of youth in the casting of Kenneth Haigh as the ad executive — just eight years earlier, Haigh had been the Angry Young Man who shocked the British establishment when he took to the stage in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. And of course there’s the irony of George Harrison playing a version of himself, in a scene which lightly critiques the commodification of youth culture: a phenomena that he and his band mates were and are most definitely a part of.

The scene, like A Hard Day’s Night as a whole, is deceptive in its simplicity.

A Hard Day’s Night was a low-budget quickie that was made with the express purpose of selling records at the height of Beatlemania. Manager Brian Epstein signed a deal with United Artists in October 1963 to produce the film for just £189,000 – about a tenth of a typical film budget at the time – which album pre-sales would make back before the film even finished production. 

It wasn’t surprising that the film would turn a profit, but what was surprising – especially to critics at the time – was just how good it turned out to be. On its release, Sight and Sound critic Geoffrey Nowell-Smith wrote:

“It’s a shining example of the maxim about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It can hardly be called well directed (…) Nor is it particularly well acted (…) And yet it works”. (Sight and Sound, Autumn, 1964)

Mixing techniques from the French New Wave, silent film, surrealist humour and documentary filmmaking, A Hard Day’s Night is a marketing film that ended up being a masterpiece. Its impact on pop culture is so immense that it’s been credited with everything from introducing the idea that British music and fashion could be cool, to inventing the music video. It’s also a lot of fun, rewarding repeat viewings with delicious little details, like George knocking over his amp during a performance, and Ringo vibing with a very tall man in a nightclub. 

The French film critic and director Jacques Rivette once said that “every film is a documentary of its own making”. A Hard Day’s Night captures modern pop stardom as it was being invented. The film’s faux documentary style was partly dictated by necessity: black-and-white film was cheaper, and since the boys had no acting experience, director Richard Lester didn’t want to force them into a situation where they’d have to awkwardly deliver dialogue, or crowbar in excuses to perform songs. This was a situation that Elvis Presley found himself in constantly, and which was already starting to seem passé in 1964.

Screenwriter Alun Owen wrote the script after spending time on the road with the band, taking note of their distinctly Scouse humour, their intimacy and banter, and their individual parts in the group’s dynamic. He wrote a heightened version of each Beatle for them to play. Crucially, Owen was a working-class Welshman who’d grown up in Liverpool, so he understood the group’s vernacular and wrote scenarios and dialogue based on their real experiences, which they would be comfortable delivering. 

And unlike Elvis, or Frank Sinatra, or any other pop star on film before, these guys live in a world where The Beatles exist. Their awareness of their fame places them at a distance from it — they’re as amused by it as the audience is. 

The scene where John convinces a woman that he’s not, in fact, John Lennon, encapsulates how a person’s celebrity can become divorced from and unrecognisable to the real person. 

A woman tells John: “You don’t look like him at all” and John says, to himself: “She looks more like him than I do.”

The film also distinguishes the ‘real’ Beatles by drawing attention to the way that their images are captured, copied and disseminated. Paul’s grandfather (an agent of chaos played by Steptoe and Son’s Wilfrid Bramble) repeatedly asks the boys to autograph a group photo, which he makes forgeries of and attempts to sell. In the press conference scene, George poses for a photographer whose snaps appear on screen as a contact sheet. In the ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ sequence, the slow motion shots of the band jumping references their already established iconography, particularly Fiona Adams’ photo of the band leaping behind Euston Station, which was used on the cover of the EP Twist and Shout. The band is seen through various TV monitors in the studio’s control room, and there’s a visual gag involving large beetles in the background while the band rehearses on stage. Through editing, mise-en-scene and blocking, the film distinguishes the flesh-and-blood Beatles at its centre, from the two-dimensional avatars most fans were used to seeing. 

The level of fame The Beatles experienced during the making of the film was intense and new. Watching it with 60 years of hindsight, in the era of stan culture, phone chucking, and parasocial relationships, it’s striking to see the light-headedness with which the film portrays the intense fandom. 

The fans presented a problem for production, and Owen observed how the band’s movements were restricted by the mania surrounding them. But the film’s purpose was to serve Beatlemania, so the feeling of constraint was expressed through surrealism and humour – for example, during ‘I Should Have Known Better’, literally placing the band in a cage while schoolgirls try to touch them like zoo animals.

This attitude seems to have been couched in reality. A documentary called The First US Visit, shot by the Maysles brothers just weeks before production on this film started, shows that, at this stage, The Beatles treated their fame with humour and bemusement. The darker, more dangerous side to fan behaviour had not yet reared its head. 

More recent films about pop stars tend to walk a fine line between appreciating fandom – because without it, where would the star be? – and exploring the toll it takes on the artist. Of films about celebrities who have reached the levels of fame comparable to The Beatles, two stand out: One Direction’s This Is Us and Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana. 

Both films feature their subjects interacting with fans, but they’re in much more controlled environments, like meet and greets (which are surreal in their own way). Modern celebrities know the double-edged sword of fame: they know that they need to connect with fans, but the implications for their personal safety are on a whole other level to what was considered when The Beatles were filming A Hard Day’s Night. They live in a world that, for better or worse, The Beatles helped usher in. This is all the more tragic when considering that 16 years after filming, John Lennon would be shot and killed by a fan whose warped justification for the act was that Lennon had become, in his unstable mind, “a phoney”. 

But this would all happen later. For the time being, John, Paul, George and Ringo took Beatlemania in their stride, building their public personas on the fly. In fact, that carving out of four distinct personas for The Beatles was another invention of Alun Owen. According to Paul Du Noyer (writing in MOJO):

“Owen watched the four personalities and amplified them for effect. Though each of The Beatles would come to find their respective stereotypes stifling, it was an accidental stroke of marketing genius. At that time, the British and American publics had only the vaguest notion of individual Beatles. In fact their defining qualities, to most adult minds, were the identikit mop tops and peculiar accent. It was through A Hard Day’s Night that The Beatles first emerged as four distinct entities, immeasurably adding to the interest and complexity of the group.”

This set the template for the way in which musicians are marketed to this very day, from Take That to the Spice Girls, to BTS and TXT.  

Yet the film also goes a long way to reinforce the idea that The Beatles are strongest when they are together as a unit. When Ringo decides to go AWOL, thanks to some meddling by Paul’s grandfather, he proves to be completely inept at navigating the world. He nearly gets into a fight, is rejected by women, and causes minor havoc at a pub. The scene is played for comedy, but it also shows us a glimpse of a world without The Beatles: drab, hostile, devoid of humour. It reinforces the idea that four Beatles are better than one, and the freedom they crave is better experienced as a group. Like Nowell-Smith said: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

A Hard Day’s Night is a bundle of contradictions: a scripted comedy that feels authentic, a celebration of image making that both critiques and revels in the process, a commercial product that’s genuinely artistic. Its lightning-in-a-bottle quality is proven by the fact that it didn’t set a formula: aspects of the film have permeated pop culture separately, but there’s no A Hard Day’s Night 2. That’s fine, because even though the film turns 60 this year, it never gets old.