A Hard Day's Night (Part 6: And a room)

More chasing and more studied pointlessness as we head into the film's final scenes. We look at the Buster Keaton influence on the escalating police chase scenes, and ask whether Ringo is actually back where he belongs when he rejoins the group, given that there's been no narrative resolution of his earlier discontent. We look at the filming and editing techniques of the concert scene, and have a look at John's final words for Grandfather.

• 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 1905 film The Life of Charles Peace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCNuY7SH6YY
• Buster Keaton's Cops: https://youtu.be/_JdW1vJbKCY
• The film's car thief John Bluthal as the Leaning Tower of Pisa replica salesman in Superman III: https://youtu.be/Vvz6MTymE-U
• The Young Ones episode "Boring" has the discriminatory language we refer to cut out on BBC iPlayer but you can find the original scene if you're interested enough to Google it. This does have an Abbey Road visual gag for good measure though: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00bfqm6/the-young-ones-series-1-3-boring

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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