The progress of The Beatles up to their film A HARD DAY’S NIGHT is still stunning to contemplate. They went from being the number one band in Liverpool to the number on band in England. They had recorded two best selling albums that still hold up as pop music classics, several hit singles that still get radio play, and had conquered America with the single "I Want to Hold Your Hand". A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (1964), as an album and a movie, was the artistic high point of the Beatlemania years (1962-1964).
Compared to the typical popstar film vehicle, A HARD DAY’S NIGHT was, as one critic called it, "The CITIZEN KANE of jukebox musicals." In the face of The Beatles’ film, Elvis Presley’s "meet a few gals, sing a few songs" approach to movies seems positively moronic. There is more intelligent, witty dialogue in the opening ten minutes of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT than you will find in all of Elvis Presley’s gal-o-ramas. You could also gather the best of the songs Elvis sang in his movies from G.I. BLUES (1960) to CHANGE OF HABIT (1970), and while you will come up with a "Can’t Help Falling in Love with You" here and a "Return to Sender" there, you would be hard pressed to find seven songs as good as those featured in the Beatles’ first film.
The production was blessed with a sympathetic producer in Walter Shenson, and an innovative director well-versed in music and comedy in Dick Lester. Lester, who had previously worked with Peter Sellers on TV and in the movies, was the ideal director for The Beatles. His sense of humor gibed with The Beatles, and his hand held camerawork and quick cutting perfectly jelled with the excitement The Beatles themselves generated. In addition, he added several surrealistic visual gags and sequences to the film so that it became not only a feast for the ears but also for the eyes.
TV writer Alun Owen spent a few days in the life of The Beatles and wrote a script about a few days in the life of The Beatles. Owen captured the Beatles’ fishbowl existence of going from hotel to press conference to hotel to concert, and even let Paul’s grandfather in the film sum it up: "I thought I was supposed to be getting a change of scenery, but so far, I’ve been in a train and room, a car and a room, and a room and a room. That might be all right for a bunch of proto-geegaws like you lot, but I’m feeling decidedly straight-jacketed!"
