"A Hard Day's Night"

The great Beatles movie reminds us how much they gave -- and how much we took.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Dec 1, 2000 | There was a time, shortly after John Lennon's death, when "A Hard Day's Night" was almost unbearable to watch. It was bad enough that we all knew how the band's story had ended, with lawyers and negotiations and daggers of mistrust shooting four ways and then, the worst thing imaginable, silence. But in the early '80s the story took a sadder and more jagged turn. If it was hard to think of the 1980 John as dead, leaving behind some great and some mediocre solo records and a grieving widow nobody ever liked much anyway, it was incomprehensible that the 1964 John -- the one we'd loved first -- was gone too.

Movie stars die all the time; then we see their movies and they live again momentarily on the screen, and their beauty and youth are more a comfort than a reproach. But for a while there, the unrepentant exhilaration of "A Hard Day's Night" -- even if it was, perhaps, a cartoon inversion of the Beatles' real-life nightmare of celebrity -- just felt wrong. Forget all the muttered contentions that the first of the Beatles to die was the brightest one, or the funniest one, or the most beloved one. It wouldn't have mattered which one was gone. Personally, I never wanted the Beatles to reunite, but even if they were barely speaking to one another I wanted them to exist on the planet -- or at least in some alternate living universe -- as a complete set. Watching them run from screeching fans in "A Hard Day's Night," less like four individual young men than a single terrified organism, was just a painful reminder that they were permanently broken apart.

Of course, you get over these things. In rock 'n' roll, not to mention life, people you care about die, and before long "A Hard Day's Night" had returned to what it had been for me since the first time I saw it on television as a kid in the mid-'60s: an hour and a half of pure, chaotic bliss -- as if school had just let out forever. It feels good and right that as we near the 20th anniversary of Lennon's death, "A Hard Day's Night," with a restored picture and soundtrack, is beginning to make its way to theaters around the country. (It opens Friday at New York's Film Forum.) It's a celebratory act rather than a reflective one. You can go leave flowers at Strawberry Fields in Central Park if you want; I'd rather catch John taking a snort, one dainty nostril at a time, from a Coke bottle -- which, if you look closely for the joke within the joke, is actually a bottle of Pepsi.

The spruced-up "A Hard Day's Night" looks and sounds like new, although even on video it never looked like a relic. It's one of those rare pictures that are both of their time and self-renewingly modern. Director Richard Lester borrowed techniques from the French new wave (quick cutting, startling point-of-view shots) and used them to concoct a document of a joyful cultural phenomenon that's filled with joy itself.

And Gil Taylor's cinematography, crispened and cleaned up, is more of a marvel than ever. His gorgeously framed shots mark "A Hard Day's Night" as one of the most vital-looking black-and-white films ever made. When the Beatles "spontaneously" launch into "I Should Have Known Better" from the caged-in luggage compartment of a train as a group of girls cluster outside, Taylor shoots the crisscrossing fence wires not as a cold, defensive barrier but as a protective one, one that fosters a kind of intimacy: It's all that separates the Beatles from the world, but it also frames them beautifully, a visual affirmation that these four raffishly striking young men were made to be seen as well as heard.

The story line of "A Hard Day's Night" is a souped-up musical-fantasy version of the Beatles' relationship to real-life fame at the time, a fable about their having to work so hard at being the Beatles that they'd be elated just to have one day off. And so they try to take it: They've been transported by train to a city where they're scheduled to give a TV performance, but they're scuttling off and looking for mischief every chance they get.

Against the wishes of their road manager Norm (Norman Rossington), they head out to a discotheque to dance and meet girls. (Meanwhile, Paul's shifty-eyed, cantankerous grandfather, played deliciously by Wilfred Brambell, borrows a waiter's tux and heads to the casino to win some money and chat up a buxom blond or two.) The next day, Norm forbids them to leave the theater where they'll be performing until after their rehearsal is over; like disobedient schoolboys they rush out a back door, down a fire escape and onto a blissfully empty green field, where "Can't Buy Me Love" kicks in.

The whole movie is about evading capture, about longing for freedom and just a few of the perks of normal human life, but only until it's time for the Beatles to perform. Then, it seems, they miraculously find peace in the midst of the chaos of rock 'n' roll. Onstage and doing what they do best, they're happiest and perhaps most completely themselves. The thing that robs them of the chance to be average human beings is also the very thing that buys them love.

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