Six decades ago, we were in the midst of Beatlemania. On February 1, the Fab Four achieved their first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. The Beatles, four lads from Liverpool (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison), invaded the United States that month, making three historic appearances on CBS’ “The Ed Sullivan Show.” They were greeted with the shouts of young girls with developing hormones. On April 4, they had the top five singles on the chart: “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Twist and Shout,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please Please Me.”
Despite their tremendous success, expectations were low for their debut picture, “A Hard Day’s Night,” which released in the United States on August 11. The majority of films featuring a popular band or performer were terrible. So much so that the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther was taken aback when he viewed the film, which he described as “a whale of a comedy” with “so much good humor going for it that it’s awfully hard to resist.” It’s a fantastic combination of wild clowning in the old Marx Brothers manner, and it’s done with such sparkling camera work that it tickles the intellect and electrifies the nerves.” Crowther singled out Richard Lester, who, he claimed, “directed at such a rapid clip that it appears
Because no one was sure f the Beatles would just be a passing fancy, the black-and-white movie was made in just six weeks for $500,000. And it premiered in English theaters three month after it was completed. TCM.com noted: “Lester shot the movie on the run with a quirky visual style that draws on his experience as a director of television commercials and utilizes some of the techniques of the French New Wave filmmakers. The London street scenes had to be filmed furtively with only a shot or two possible before interruptions by screaming fans and the police trying to control them.”
Alun Owen, who earned an Oscar nomination for his story and screenplay, came up with a simple but effective plot-chronicling 36 hours in the lives of the boys as they to get to the theater for a TV appearance while Paul tries to keep his troublemaking “clean old man” grandfather (Wilfred Brambell) out of mischief. McCartney would later note: “Alun hung around us and was careful to try and put words in our mouths that he might have heard us speak, so I thought he did a very good script.”
