With the reissue of “A Hard Day’s Night” in theaters last week, as well as the new Blu-ray upgrade on the Criterion Collection label, a lot of stories have been floating around about how well the movie holds up and how the band’s comic energy, natural charm and snappy, toe-tapping early songs help make it every bit as agreeable today as when it was initially released 50 years ago.
I was one of those teenagers who saw “A Hard Day’s Night” in 1964, and while I had already enjoyed some of the band's songs, it was the movie that converted me to Beatlemania.
My wife and I watched it again the other night and can attest that all of the half-century-later raves are spot on. “A Hard Day’s Night” is still a joyous film. In fact, when it was over, we both commented that we haven’t felt so good, so happy, so invigorated by a movie in a long time.
It was just fun. And, really, how many movies today are just fun?
But with all the press it’s received in the past week or two, there seems to have been little written about the film’s director, the real creative talent that drove “A Hard Day’s Night” to become an influential artistic force rather than just another Elvis-style rock-music knockoff — an American expatriate in England named Richard Lester.
He certainly gets his due on the supplemental materials in the Criterion Collection set, however, including excerpts from a recent audio interview with the now 82-year-old retired filmmaker.
Also included is Lester’s 11-minute short film from 1960, which led to his directing “A Hard Day’s Night.”
That short, “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film,” with the filmmaker credited as “Dick Lester,” is a very dry, still-amusing series of silent non sequitur sight gags set in an open field and featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and some of their “Goon Show” radio/TV pals, along with other up-and-coming character players.
The actor that opens and closes the film is an unbilled Leo McKern, who would go on to play the villain Clang in Lester’s second Beatles film, “Help!” (1965), though he is best remembered as “Rumpole of the Bailey” in that 1978-92 BBC series. Also on hand is Graham Stark, who would play Sellers’ deadpan assistant (and a variety of other loony characters) in the “Pink Panther” movies for Blake Edwards. Lester is also on camera.
The short was nominated for an Oscar, and fans of Monty Python will note the seeds of that group’s anarchic comedy being planted.
Lester’s style is distinguished by his innovative camera work, his penchant for quick-cut edits and his fusion of music and (often silent) action, which he developed while working on TV commercials and low-budget, live-comedy shows for the BBC in the 1950s and early ’60s, a time when creative freedom was encouraged. (Lester’s innovative musical interludes in “A Hard Day’s Night” years later earned him an honorary award from MTV as “Father of the Music Video.”)
But perhaps the strongest aspect that vividly runs through Lester’s work is his sense of humor, particularly his propensity for cleverly choreographed visual comedy inspired by the classic work of Buster Keaton (an idol with whom Lester was able to work in 1966 when he directed “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”).
From “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film” through Lester’s two pre-Beatles features, “It’s Trad, Dad!” (1952, released in America as “Ring-A-Ding Rhythm”) and “The Mouse on the Moon” (1963, a sequel to “The Mouse That Roared”), Lester infused all of his work with myriad sight gags.
That’s certainly true of “A Hard Day’s Night” and also of Lester’s highly praised farce “The Knack” (1965), followed the same year by “Help!”
After that, Lester packed his adaptation of the Broadway musical farce “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum” with wall-to-wall gags, then unexpectedly followed it up with a pair of very dark anti-war satires, “How I Won the War” (1967) and “The Bed-Sitting Room” (1969), which are looked upon more favorably today than they were at the time.
Then came “The Three Musketeers” (1974) and “The Four Musketeers” (1975), filmed back to back, the first a hilarious, slapstick-filled retelling of the Dumas story, and the second a gentler sequel with the same cast. Lester also did major-studio films that made him rich but didn’t always leave him artistically satisfied, such as “The Ritz” (1976), “Butch and Sundance: The Early Years” (1979), “Cuba” (1979), “Superman II” (1980) and “Superman III” (1983).
Of course, Lester also managed to sneak in something more subversive here and there, as with the too-hip-for-its-time romantic comedy “Petulia” (1968), starring George C. Scott and Julie Christie, and a revisionist, somewhat melancholy, late-in-life look at the Robin Hood legend, “Robin and Marion” (1976), starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn.
But all of them, even the more serious films, include the kind of physical comedy that was already fading in the second half of the 20th century. Only Blake Edwards could keep up with Lester in terms of sight gags in his movies, and it was as if they were the only two filmmakers who cared about keeping a dying art alive.
Sadly, slapstick as an art, as opposed to merely a pratfall, appears to be quite dead.
And yet, as long as these films are alive, so is visual humor. It’s quite wonderful to be able to have “A Hard Day’s Night” on the shelf, ready to be watched whenever we like.
Or whenever we just want to feel happy.
Chris Hicks is the author of "Has Hollywood Lost Its Mind? A Parent’s Guide to Movie Ratings." He also writes at www.hicksflicks.com and can be contacted at hicks@deseretnews.com.