Despite having a high amount of affection for the Beatles that came on in my twenties -- later than it did for most people -- this delightful lark of a film had escaped me until this point. I'd had it lined up as a future watch on Kanopy for years, but, despite its short running time, it never came up any time I lurked around the free streaming site looking for that night's viewing.
The "right occasion" finally came on Sunday afternoon. Our projector was still set up from the night before, when the Australian film Paper Planes was watched as a family, then The Cell was watched decidedly not as a family. So I decided to use my Sunday afternoon downtime to watch something quick before I went off to the store prior to our dinner. (I ended up watching two more movies there, one of which was Luck, which I wrote about yesterday.)
I enjoyed the heck out of the movie. There's something about it that feels sort of proto Monty Python. British humor and absurdism is something that falls right in my wheelhouse, and A Hard Day's Night had it in spades.
It's not the kind of movie you have to watch super closely, I would argue. I got the sense early on that the actual plot was not going to matter too much, plus there's the fact that it is broken up here and there by songs. You're watching it to see four young men who were about to be kings of the world, if they were not already, in the last moments of their innocence before life started to become significantly more complicated for them. They're enjoying each others' company and having a blast. We have a blast vicariously.
Since I had determined it did not require my undivided attention, I was noodling around a bit on the internet -- at least on an errand that was directly related to this movie -- and I discovered that it was nominated for two Oscars, including for its original screenplay by Alun Owen.
Huh?
This is a series of loosely connected episodes if ever there was one. You can diagram a plot from it, to be sure, but the plot can be summarized as follows: "Thirty-six hours in the life of the Beatles as they prepare for a television appearance." And of course this is not the real Beatles, even though the band members are all playing themselves -- it's a loosely fictionalized version of them, an amplified version of their real character traits, run through silly scenarios that function as a commentary on fame and the place they occupied on the world stage.
I really liked this movie -- four stars on Letterboxd -- but an example of a tidy or even wholly successful screenplay it is not.
Oh it's not a bad screenplay. It's funny, it produces numerous humorous scenarios and it gets at something essential about the Beatles. A bad version of the script would probably put a lot of lines in their mouths that they would never say, not even a fictionalized version of them.
I just can't square it, though, as realistic competition for the other four nominees that year:
Um, yeah, so those options are ... let's see ...
Father Goose (winner)
One Potato, Two Potato
The Organizer
That Man from Rio
Okay so I have literally never heard of the other four nominees. The nomination for A Hard Day's Night is starting to make a bit more sense now.
Adapted screenplays must have been far more common back then. In fact, original screenplay did not even exist as a category until 1940, whereas adapted screenplay goes back to the origins of the award.
The 1964 adapted screenplay nominees had all the heavy hitters:
Becket (winner)
Dr. Strangelove
Mary Poppins
My Fair Lady
Zorba the Greek
It's interesting to consider how few films back then were conceived of for the screen only. Film clearly started as a medium intended to enliven famous books or plays, not to depict ideas hatched purely for the form. That said, in only its second year as an award, the best original screenplay Oscar went to Citizen Kane, so it's not only a weird selection of lesser films that were first envisioned for the screen. Nineteen sixty-four seems to be a bit of an odd duck -- or maybe an odd goose -- as 8 1/2 was nominated for the award the year before that and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg the year after. Who knows, maybe Father Goose, One Potato, Two Potato, The Organizer and That Man from Rio are all great.
But back to A Hard Day's Night. I hadn't realized how much praise had been heaped on it in general. Time magazine has listed it as one of the hundred greatest films of all time and The British Film Institute listed it as the 88th best British film of the 20th century. (That second bit of praise seems a bit more reasonable.)
Me, I knew I was in for a good time as soon as we first met Paul McCartney's fictitious grandfather, probably the silliest character in this whole silly romp. He's played by an actor named Wilfrid Brambell, and I had a hard time believing the guy was only 52 years old when he played this role -- not only because that makes him only 30 years older than McCartney himself, but because I'll be 52 in three years and I won't look nearly as gaunt and withered, with as bad teeth, as this guy.
Then again, I suppose bad teeth are even more British than Monty Python.
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