In 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, the Fab Four didn't have the time to make a conventional cash-in movie. Their solution was to hire Welsh playwright Alun Owen, whose BBC teleplay No Trams to Lime Street – now lost, alas – had demonstrated an aptitude for the lovely Liverpudlian dialect.
Owen’s brilliant Oscar-nominated screenplay doubles as a primer in classic Beatlesian sarcasm: a sort of Greatest Hits of Scouse Deadpan that incorporates many things that the band said (or almost said).
Comme ça – Question: “How did you find America?” John Lennon: “We turned left at Greenland”. Gentleman on train: “Don’t take that tone with me, young man. I fought the war for your sort.” Ringo Starr: “I bet you’re sorry you won.”
This is a perfect artistic storm. At the moment when The Beatles are hitting pop nirvana with such two-and-a-quarter minute masterpieces as She Loves You and Can't Buy Me Love, along comes the quintessentially quirky Dick Lester, whose previous work with comic anarchists Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers made him a logical choice to chronicle the madness that surrounded the mop-tops.
A Hard Day's Night takes the view that the band members are prisoners of their own fame. The screaming girls who pursue them – including Patricia Boyd, the future Mrs Harrison – are very real and very dangerous.
The film is as caught up in The Beatles and Beatlemania as it is dismissive of same. That sly, subversive tone would later inspire The Monkees TV show and countless spy spoofs. The grammar is so common place in contemporary culture that it's easy to overlook how ground-breaking and experimental Lester's picture really was.
Every jukebox movie since – from Can't Stop the Music to 1D:3D – has paid homage. But no movie will ever be as cool as this one. A Hard Day's Night's nouvelle vague sheen is the real, low-budget deal. The melancholic undercurrent to the search for Ringo remains as affecting as it is comical.
Fifty years after its initial release, the song remains the same: yeah, yeah, yeah. we will yeah. And then some.
