A Hard Day's Night (Part 1: A train)

Come 'ead, then. We start by looking at roughly the first 16 minutes of the Beatles' 1964 film debut. Expect a detailed breakdown of their first dialogue scene in the train carriage ("Who's that little old man?"), and how it establishes straight away through absurdist techniques that these characters don't inhabit a strict reality, giving Richard Lester licence to do more or less what he wants from now on. We unpack the generational and class dynamics at play in the encounter with the train commuter ("I bet you're sorry you won!") and discuss, in frankly more detail than anyone wants, whether or not the film is a musical.

• A Hard Day's Night is often on BBC iPlayer, although not at the moment, and available to rent on a few streaming services. https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/a-hard-days-night There's also a good quality copy on YouTube at the moment, which might of course be taken down soon. Do yourself a favour and buy the Blu-ray anyway.
• Get Samira Ahmed's excellent book about the film, from the BFI Modern Classics series: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/hard-days-night-9781839029394/
• Guns N' Roses' November Rain video, which as explained would not exist without I Should've Known Better: https://youtu.be/8SbUC-UaAxE
• The Proclaimers jukebox musical Sunshine on Leith, which is great: https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/sunshine-on-leith 
• A bit more on Theatre of the absurd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_absurd

Meet the Beatles Films Podcast

The Beatles Films Podcast is hosted by Matt Looker and Ed Williamson. We're both film writers and Beatles fans. Between us we've written for TheShiznit.co.uk, Total Film, Den of Geek and Virgin Media.

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