Lester Bangs famously wrote that the only rocker in A Hard Day's Night is Paul's grandfather.
It's a relentlessly weird movie, far weirder than the justly maligned Magical Mystery Tour. The oddest thing is that in A Hard Day's Night all of the songs concern romantic love, but nothing in the film has anything to do with romantic love. I mean, if you were an alien anthropologist limited to understanding human beings from repeated watching, you'd just have no idea what these guys were singing about.
There are three main tensions: (1) Paul's anarchic grandfather causing trouble, (2) the bossy manager not letting them go to parties where people stand around smoking cigarettes and yelling at one another over the din, and (3) the variety show squares not getting the Beatles in various ways. All of this is set against a background of screaming teenage girls and odd facets of the British class system. And there's a truncated concert at the end with close up shots of kids screaming.
Bangs wrote a controversial eulogy for Lennon, which included this gem:
Look: I don't think I'm insensitive or a curmudgeon. In 1965 John Lennon was one of the most important people in the world. It's just that today I feel deeply alienated from rock 'n' roll and what it has meant or could mean, alienated from my fellow men and women and their dreams or aspirations.
I don't know what is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch and gobble any shred, any scrap of a dream that someone declared over ten years ago. Perhaps the younger ones are sadder, because at least my peers may have some nostalgic memory of the long-cold embers they're kneeling to blow upon, whereas the kids who have to make do with things like the _Beatlemania_ show are being sold a bill of goods.
Kids today!*
In light of Bangs' eulogy, it's interesting that the high point of the film is probably** around the forty-four minute mark, where fashion people are trying to get George Harrison's opinion on a new shirt design. It's very funny, albeit no less manipulative for all that. The "I'm not selling you a bill of goods because I mock the sellers of goods bills" trope is certain to outlast all the mods and rockers among us. I think Ringo had this one figured out.
[Notes:
*My mom used to have the following, attributed to Plato, Socrates, or Aristotle (I forget) on her office door:
The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.
Quote investigator declares shenanigans.
**Second place is tied between Ringo's dancing and the penultimate lines of the movie, the manager's "Now there's only one thing I'm going to say to you John Lennon. You're a swine." Weirdly, this seems to reconcile the band and manager and they all run gaily to the helicopter to the strains of "Hard Day's Night," Paul's Grandfather somehow already affixed to the door handle via handcuff.]
Recent Comments