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| The crashing guitar chord that opens A Hard Day's Night remains one of the most stirring sounds in music, and this is a comedy which captures better than any other the claustrophobia and insanity of becoming a pop celebrity. |
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Dick Lester's direction, endlessly eclectic and with a sense of humour that mingles the Goons with the Marx brothers, has the same semi-improvised, homespun energy associated with the French New Wave at its best, without the slightest element of Gallic pretension. His influence on pop videos can still be felt.
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The swiftly composed songs are wonderfully melodic; in its idiosyncratic way, this must rank as one of the great film musicals of all time. |
Lester's flashy, gimmicky camera-work (the cinematographer was Gilbert Taylor) and scriptwriter Alun Owen's image-building of the Fab Four as the boys next door still works like a dream: this is a dream of the Sixties as they never were, but as we would have liked them to have been. |
George Martin was nominated for an Oscar, but oddly none of the songs was. The film was shot in seven weeks, for around half a million dollars; it made a handsome profit. |
| Note on censorship: In Portugal, teenagers under 17 were forbidden from seeing the film. The censor also ordered cuts. |
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| "We're not very good, but we had a good producer." |
| (Paul McCartney to Princess Margaret at the London premiere) |
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