An anniversary of sorts went unnoticed last year. It was just over 50 years since the liberation of the teenage girl.
The catalyst was the rise of The Beatles, and the phenomenon known as Beatlemania, in which the young teenagers of Britain took their previously private passions out of the bedroom and into the streets. They screamed, they fainted, they tore out their hair and yes, many did wet themselves.
The same thing happened in Australia during their 1964 tour. Sinatra had aroused similar passion in American teenage girls during the war, followed by Elvis, but this time the revolution was televised. By 1963, televisions were widespread in Britain and the British media was fascinated by the way these girls behaved. They were shameless and classless, unstoppable and uncontrolled, unbridled and, to many older people, unBritish. And they were about to be the subject of a movie.
A Hard Day's Night is ostensibly about two days in the lives of the Beatles, as they race from Liverpool to London, pursued by teenage girls (and a few boys, including a young Phil Collins). It ends with a concert filmed over four days at the Scala Theatre, in London. There is a famous story that one of the six concert cinematographers had to rush to the dentist after it was done; the noise had dislodged his back teeth. It wasn't the music, but the girls.
They are at least as much the subject of this movie as the Fab Four. Indeed, they power the film with a massive and manic female energy that was hard to control.
No matter where the crew went, the kids seemed to know the locations in advance. In the first shot, John, George and Ringo are running full-tilt towards us along a city street, pursued by teenage girls. The soundtrack launches into the title song, starting with that famous lone guitar chord (a D Minor 11th for the guitar players) as George falls flat on his face, bringing Ringo down behind. John bursts out laughing, without breaking stride. George is soon up and following, laughing too. As they pass the camera and head in to the station, we can see George checking his left hand for damage. Guitar players need their hands, after all. The teenagers barrel in after them, like hounds on a fox hunt.
The accident sets the exuberant, human tone, and they keep coming. There are two more falls in the first scene, as the three scramble aboard a train. Paul and his grandfather, played by Wilfrid Brambell, arrive in disguise, and they all take off in a rush. To that extent, the film is real: it is an imaginative and zany reimagining of the lives they were now leading as the new pop sensations of the world. In less than a year, they had gone from an extremely hard-working Liverpool band with a local following to the biggest noise in Europe.
The teenage rampage is innocent in this film. It's coupled with so much youthful humour from the band that it is impossible not to be touched by it now, 50 years on, with John and George gone. They were so young! Shooting in black and white, we get a series of close-ups in which they look like teenagers themselves: unmarked faces, no lines, no frowns, no Lennon glasses to shield them from the world. All of those things came later, after fame had taken its toll, but in 1964, they were still enjoying what they had unleashed.
The film is, in one sense, a marvellous accident that changed the course of both movies and music. Big claim? Try imagining MTV and the history of the rock clip without the template that American expatriate director Richard Lester established in this movie. Many years later, the founders of MTV sent him a scroll proclaiming him the father of MTV. "I wrote back saying I demand a blood test," Lester says on the support materials of a splendid new Blu-Ray released last year for the 50th anniversary. Newly remastered, it hasn't looked this good since 1964.
The movie exists, at least in part, because the group had not yet penetrated the United States. In late 1963, Brian Epstein made a movie deal with United Artists, through its recently established London office, that included the rights to a soundtrack album. Capitol Records, which represented the Beatles in the US, had refused to release their first album. The first thing producer Walter Shenson told John Lennon was that he and Paul had to write six or seven new songs for the soundtrack album. UA Records could then release it in the US before Capitol realised what they didn't own. That was why the film was made in such a hurry. Shooting took place from March 2 to April 24, 1964, and it opened in the first week of July in Britain. The critical and box office acclaim was instant.
Within a year, the love affair between the band and the kids was over. What was the point of playing for girls who made more noise than the band? Teenage girls had made the Beatles and their screaming destroyed them as a live act. No wonder the next film was called Help!
"And now my life has changed in oh so many ways,
My independence seems to vanish in the haze…"
On twitter: @ptbyrnes
