A Hard Day's Night (Part 3: And a car)

From the hotel to the TV studio. We see the Beatles at a press event, which revisits one of the film's themes: that Beatlemania persists with or without the Beatles themselves. We get into more class dynamics between Ringo Starr and the sound engineer ("Aren't you being rather arbitrary?") and John Lennon's delivery of If I Fell gets us into discussing whether he could sing love songs straightforwardly without undercutting them with a joke, something which Paul McCartney didn't struggle with.

• 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/
• The scene we mention from Richard Lester's Superman II, in which General Zod walks on water and an onlooker throws away his drink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aISDPLtY-28

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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