Was That First Hard Day’s Night Really Fifty Years Ago?

By Doug Draper

It was the summer of 1964 and if you were somewhere between the ages of 12 and 20 and plugged into the music scene at the time, it could not be more exciting.

My Uncle Don Draper, who worked as a projectionist in the Niagara, Ontario area in one of those grand old and long-gone Art Deco- theatres from the first half of the last century, was told by his managers that he was in for an exciting time too. But in his case and in the case of others screening films at the time, it might not be the kind of excitement he would like.

A movie was coming his theatre’s way, he was warned – one that had already been screened in a few select theatres across North America, and it had audiences of young teens literally ripping up the seats and screaming so loud the walls were shaking. So, at the very least, you may want to come to work with earplugs.

The movie was called A Hard Day’s Night starring The Beatles – a group from England that exploded onto the scene earlier that year in something called Beatlemania. And by the time the hastily produced film was lighting up screens across the continent, John, Paul, George and Ringo had busted open the gates to an invasion of other British singers and groups – The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Hollies, The Kinks, Herman’s Hermits, Dusty Springfield, and many others.

It was a musical and pop culture tsunami that was almost impossible for people in their teens or early 20s at the time not to become totally engaged in by the time A Hard Day’s Night hit the theatres.

According my Uncle Don, it was a hard day’s night for him and his contemporaries. But oh, how exciting it was for those of us who were soaking up all of this, like golden sunshine on a beach, at the time.

And it was not only us. Anyone who got a chance to get away from the screaming and hear the dialogue and music in the movie, began to appreciate what record producer George Martin has said about The Beatles time and time again – that, in the beginning, when they were coming into the studio with songs like Love Me Do, he was more swept away with “the charm and charisma” of John, Paul, George and Ringo than he was with the music.

But by ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, Martin and others were already noticing advances in the songwriting with tunes like “If I Fell” and “And I Love Her.” Great conductors and composers of the day, like Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops and Leonard Bernstein were declaring that they were composing some pretty damn good music (and Fiedler was even beginning to record his own instrumental versions of it).

Young and energetic Beatles on the run in a scene from A Hard Day’s Night

Rock legends like David Crosby, who was spreading his young wings as a co-founder of a band called the Byrds then, and would later go on to be part of Crosby, Stills & Nash, once recalled going to see A Hard Day’s Night with his musical friends in 1964 and saying; ‘Yes, now I know what I want to do for the rest of my life.’ He described the movie as ‘an instructional film on how to be a rock band.’ 

There are other great film critics who have given thumbs up to the film and have credited the four Beatles for their Marx Brothers antics.

Perhaps the greatest tribute of all to this film 50 years later is that it has been completely premastered for release this summer of 2014 on big screens across North America and is available in a new DVD/Blu-ray package in most well-stocked music and video stores.

Not bad for a movie that some corporate executives at Capital Records and United Artists viewed as a “knock off” then by a band they assumed might only have a fan base for maybe a year or so before they were forgotten. How wrong those corporate execs were.

There is no known new screening of A Hard Day’s Night in Niagara, Ontario yet, which is not surprising since the theatres here now focus on the usual so-called Hollywood summer blockbusters.

But there are viewings in Buffalo New York at a great theatre called The Screening Room. For more information click on this Buffalo News piece at http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/its-a-hard-days-night-at-the-screening-room-20140630 .

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