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A Hard Day's Night
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Editorial Reviews:
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In 1964, the Beatles had just recently exploded onto the American scene with their debut on "The Ed Sullivan Show." The group's first feature, the Academy Award-nominated "A Hard Day's Night," offered fans their first peek into a day in the life of the Beatles and served to establish the Fab Four on the silver screen, as well as to inspire the music video format. Songs: I'll Cry Instead, A Hard Day's Night, I Should've Known Better, Can't Buy Me Love, If I Fell, And I Love Her, I'm Happy Just to Dance with You, Ringo's Theme (This Boy), Tell Me Why, Don't Bother Me, I Wanna Be Your Man, All My Lovin', She Loves You.
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The Fab Four from Liverpool--John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr--in their first movie. Nobody expected A Hard Day's Night to be much more than a quick exploitation of a passing musical fad, but when the film opened it immediately seduced the world--even the stuffiest critics fell over themselves in praise (highbrow Dwight Macdonald called it "not only a gay, spontaneous, inventive comedy but it is also as good cinema as I have seen for a long time"). Wisely, screenwriter Alun Owen based his script on the Beatles' actual celebrity at the time, catching them in the delirious early rush of Beatlemania: eluding rampaging fans, killing time on trains and in hotels, appearing on a TV broadcast. American director Richard Lester, influenced by the freestyle French New Wave and British Goon Show humor, whips up a delightfully upbeat circus of perpetual motion. From the opening scene of the mop tops rushing through a train station mobbed by fans, the movie rarely stops for air. Some of the songs are straightforwardly presented, but others ("Can't Buy Me Love," set to the foursome gamboling around an empty field) soar with ingenuity. Above all, the Beatles express their irresistible personalities: droll, deadpan, infectiously cheeky. Better examples of pure cinematic joy are few and far between. --Robert Horton
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A Hard Day's Night
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User Comments About A Hard Day's Night
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Pure nostalgic joy and dreamlike pleasure
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In one word the film is so real that it reaches beyond reality and even the virtuality of a life imagined as being out of logic. But it also had to show how these four young men had to be able to capture the attention of other people and bring them into the running, first of all young people, particularly girls, and second the best representatives of the establishment, coppers. Then and but their music did not have to convince their audience. Finally the film had to satisfy the audience on the lifestyle of the Beatles and on their surrealistic reality. The four boys have to be running because at the time everything young and new was on the run since it was chased by the establishment in order to be pilloried and exposed.
The film also had to be in black and white to be out of time, eternal because looking old, even odd or oddly even.
Pure cinematographic and even photographic silk.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines.
This film reveals the fabric the myth is made of.
That is done with a plot based on their real life as musicians, etc, and at the same time with constant reference to impossible, at times absurd, breaches in this realism into some impossible meaningless or humoristic pranks.
And the Beatles are such a myth.
When you are dealing with a myth you have to look for what was new at the time when that myth appeared.
It was new, fresh, lively, light, slightly rocky and rather smoothly rolly, with some drums but not too much, and a lot of harmony and melody, but the main attraction was the use of simple catch phrases to express love, freedom, desire, alienation and yet liberation in a mellow and sweet wrapping, like the cute title of the film taken from one of the songs.
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Just a lot of fun to watch and listen to the fab four in those early years.
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A must for Beatles fans!!!
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Very recommended. A must for Beatles fans. Get this before it goes out of print(and the price skyrockets).,Beatles titles seem be under this fate. Classic Beatles film,a great restored widescreen transfer of the classic A Hard Day's Night,this is a 2 dvd set with the movie on the first dvd and the extras on the second disc. And the price is right to boot.
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That having been said, this is a very comprehensive set. But this good DVD is correctly formatted, and nothing has been cut off from the top or bottom.
The 36' documentary with reminiscences of the film's crew is fun and enlightening. The sound seems just a bit flat, and is much fuller in the restored WS Help.
Perhaps he means the original video, which was certainly cut to fit a standard TV.
The remastering here is quite good, tho perhaps not quite Criterion quality. But, these tiny quibbles aside, the boys are beautiful, energetic, fun, imaginative, and Richard Lester's revolutionary vision is just as fresh and youthful over four decades later.
The reviewer who claims that this film was originally made in 4:3 format is quite wrong. One comes away with the feeling, as if we couldn't guess from the film itself, that spirits were high (pardon the expression) and everyone felt this would be something special.
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It is great to be able to share my youth with todays youth. I bought this for my 16 year old daughter who has discovered the Beatles. She just loves their music and I am getting to enjoy them again also.
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