Getting better

A Hard Day's Night still goes down easy

by Sean Richardson

Another wave of Beatles hype is upon us, just in time for the holiday shopping season -- it's enough to make even the most ardent Fab Four fanatic sigh yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially after the '95 Anthology blitz, which did everything short of raising the dead in its desperate attempt to establish the last word on the group. But this year's model is a far more legitimate excuse for nostalgia than that overwrought series of CDs and television specials; taken together in its various multimedia guises, it's probably the snazziest Beatles retrospective ever assembled. The new CD, 1 (Capitol), pares the venerable red-and-blue double-LP best-of sets down to a sleekly packaged single-disc collection of the band's number one hits that racked up boy-band sales numbers their first week in stores. Their "first official Web site," www.thebeatles.com, doesn't yet contain much useful information, but the much-maligned Anthology project seems to have finally found its appropriate format in Chronicle Books' new coffeetable item of the same name.

That brings us to the Miramax re-release of A Hard Day's Night, the first Beatles film and the post-Ed Sullivan video highlight of their early days. The movie's picture and soundtrack have been "restored," of course, but otherwise it's the same black-and-white concert-film-cum-slapstick-vehicle that hit theaters in 1964. It follows a fictitious day in the life of the band as they shuttle in and out of an array of trains, hotels, and studios on their way to a live television performance. Accompanied by Paul's mischievous grandfather (Wilfrid Branbell) and a stiff crew of handlers, they evade hordes of screaming fans and sift through countless petty diversions that almost force them to abandon the gig.

That's about it for the plot -- which leaves plenty of room for director Richard Lester and the boys to work their magic. The Beatles play goofy, lighthearted versions of themselves, with no trace of John's defiance or Paul's megalomania. Looking all of 14, George gets the best bits, such as his riotous turn as a fashion consultant at the behest of a leggy blonde secretary. John's deadpan exchange with a fan who follows him backstage is another highlight, as is the nonsensical bubble-bath monologue he performs while George scrapes shaving cream off the bathroom mirror. It all goes down against a chaotic backdrop of screeching teenage girls that remains the definitive portrait of Beatlemania.

Then there are the musical performances. The band flash in and out of them with nary a break in the action, allowing each song to become part of the movie's big joke. But over time these sequences have taken on a life of their own, thanks in no small part to Lester's close-up-crazy camera work. He goes around the circle from one smiling face to the next on "I Should Have Known Better," during which a bunch of girls join the group for a game of cards on the train. During rehearsal, the band show off their harmonies on the ballads "If I Fell" and "And I Love Her" before livening things up with "I'm Happy Just To Dance with You" as they're about to hit the stage. Although not pop's first music videos, the performances set a stylistic precedent that anticipated MTV 20 years before its time.

After an hour of song-and-dance silliness, the plot thickens when meddling Grandpa McCartney persuades Ringo to forsake his drumming responsibilities and go "parading" around just before showtime. Ringo befriends an 11-year-old boy during a sullen walk by the river, then stops at a pub for a game of darts before getting whisked off to jail, where he's reunited with Grandpa. Suffice to say the band make it to the television broadcast by the seat of their pants, ending the film on a triumphant note with a sunny performance in front of a hysterical, swooning audience.

The soundtrack album to A Hard Day's Night is the artistic pinnacle of the Beatles' early years, the mother lode of a ridiculously accomplished body of work that some have found it fashionable to overlook in light of their later achievements. It's the band's third album but the first composed entirely of original material. The title track and "Can't Buy Me Love" got top billing on the pop charts as well as in the film; several of the disc's uniformly cheerful tracks aren't actually heard in the movie. The last time commercial Beatlemania focused this much on the early days was '94, when director Iain Softley re-created the group's Hamburg-club days in the film Backbeat and Capitol released the awe-inspiring archival CD Live at the BBC. The music isn't as revolutionary as the band's later stuff, but A Hard Day's Night remains significant as both a vivid snapshot of contemporary pop music's defining moment and a lively comedy of errors.