A Hard Day's Night (1964) on Netflix
John, Paul, George and Ringo board a train to London for a televised variety show, dodging crowds of fans. Paul's troublemaking grandfather travels with them.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.5/1050,375 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes98%
Trailer
Plot summary
The Beatles travel to London by train, where a televised variety show is to be filmed. Their manager Norm, his assistant Shake and Paul's troublemaking Irish grandfather, John McCartney, come along. The band entertains a group of schoolgirls and plays cards on the way. In London they are driven to a hotel, where Norm hands each of them a pile of fan mail to answer and they begin to feel shut in. They slip out to a party instead, and Norm and Shake march them back. Paul's grandfather, meanwhile, has gone gambling at a casino, and the group sets off to bring him back.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Hard Day's Night (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Before the American release, a United Artists executive asked director Richard Lester to dub the Beatles' voices with Mid-Atlantic accents; Paul McCartney angrily refused, saying that if Americans could understand a Texan cowboy they could understand the band's Liverpool accents.
- John Lennon wrote the Beatles' title song in one night, setting the lyrics on the back of a birthday card sent to his young son Julian; finished just eight days before filming ended, it won a Grammy for Best Performance by a Vocal Group.
- United Artists treated the film itself as a secondary consideration: its European head of production, Bud Ornstein, said the company wanted the soundtrack album out in the US ahead of Capitol Records, and any loss on the film would be recovered on the record.
- The "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence, which used the technique of cutting the images to the beat of the music, has been cited as a precursor of modern music videos.
- To obtain the U certificate for British cinemas the film had to be edited slightly: the phrase "get knotted", allegedly in reel 7 of the original submission, was judged inappropriate for a U film and had to be removed.
- Pan Books published a novelisation of the film by John Burke in 1964, priced at two shillings and sixpence; it is the first book in the English language to have the word "grotty" in print.
- The Beatles' performance of "You Can't Do That" was filmed for the film's TV concert sequence but left out of the final cut; footage had already been sent by the filmmakers and Brian Epstein to The Ed Sullivan Show, where it aired on 24 May 1964 as a tease for the release.
- "I'll Cry Instead" was considered for the film and was to be used during the police chase sequence, but director Richard Lester vetoed it in favour of the more lyrically upbeat "Can't Buy Me Love".
