A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (Proscenium/United Artists 1964) stereo, 1:27, b&w, 1.85:1 [G]
Rejected opening paragraphs for this essay:
"A HARD DAY'S NIGHT is alive. There is nothing else like it in cinema or in rock & roll. It enlivens and intensifies both forms in the innovation and force of its music and its striking visual style. Director Richard Lester dares to find the art in a form of pop music still in its infancy, years before journalists would recognize it, and he creates a new film vocabulary in the process."
"The Beatles' first film is a masterpiece, vibrant and full of life, an absorbing encapsulation of its awe-inspiring era. Adopting the framework and visual sensibility of Francois Truffaut's THE 400 BLOWS, it is just as liberating; every frame brims with power."
"To begin with, A HARD DAY'S NIGHT is one of the wittiest films ever made. Its artful yet unpretentious direction and impossible contrast -- the surreal clashing with the cinema verité -- make its humor irresistible. After it's over, you want to run the mile, and suddenly you feel like you understand everything. Richard Lester not only filmed rock & roll, he filmed life."
"I am not just writing this as an excuse to ramble about the audacious, explosive manner of the Beatles' music in 1964, but I will accept this new opportunity to say that no one has ever exerted so much outstanding pop music with such admirable force in such a tiny amount of time, and all these songs -- from the delightful 'I'm Happy Just to Dance with You' to the somberly moving 'If I Feel' and the bruising 'I Should Have Known Better' -- lift this film from a masterpiece to a miracle."
"As Greil Marcus has said, you yearn deeply when screening A HARD DAY'S NIGHT for the past, in my case a past that ended well before my lifetime. In a sense I think that was intentional, but I also think it was intentional that the movie still seems so current, so worldly. Maybe neither feeling is an accident."
"Where to begin about A HARD DAY'S NIGHT? I don't know of any movie that captures its time with such precision yet manages to remain so potent forty years later; I don't know of any movie that is so stylish yet so human, so serious about its charcters -- filmed in that stark, seductive black & white -- yet so unbelievably funny. I don't know of any movie that makes me want to live so much, as Paul's grandfather suggests. I don't know of any movie that moves me so deeply even as its humor is at its most devastating and cynical -- drummer as tramp, family as nuisance, pop as commerce. It is undoubtedly the greatest rock film ever made and I find it hard to think of life without it. It could just play on television twenty-four hours a day for all I care."
I couldn't get started on this. But maybe I have enough.
CREDITS
Directed by RICHARD LESTER Written by ALUN OWEN Produced by DENIS O'DELL / WALTER SHENSON Music by GEORGE MARTIN Cinematography GILBERT TAYLOR Cast: JOHN LENNON / PAUL MCCARTNEY / GEORGE HARRISON / RINGO STARR / WILFRED BRAMBELL / NORMAN ROSSINGTON / JOHN JUNKIN / VICTOR SPINETTI
DVD REVIEW
The Buena Vista deluxe two-disc edition is an excellent package (but yet another flimsy cardboard case). See my Beatles consumer guide for more comments. DVD grade: 94%.
DVD REVIEW