JESUS what an exhilarating movie.
I just finished watching the new Criterion Collection Blu-ray release of The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” I’d pre-ordered it from Amazon.com and it arrived today.
The transfer is immaculate, brand-new looking. Crisp and natural and balanced with very few artifacts. Every now and then a shot has a slight amount of dirt making me wonder if certain bits came from further-generation sources, but overwhelmingly the film looks fantastic. Brilliant detail and gorgeous romantic black-and-white. There are more recent black-and-white films which I think are cinematically without equal - Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” for one - but this transfer of “A Hard Day’s Night” is close, real close in vibrancy.
Criterion got this one right. They care about releasing films in the best possible quality. They were big in the laserdisc era, then seemed to fade in the VHS years (not surprising, what a shitty format), then came back with DVD and especially Blu-ray. They use the best sources and spend the time and money to restore things when needed.
There’s so much to love about “A Hard Day’s Night.” It’s a movie about The Beatles, shot as Beatlemania was reaching its peak, and it’s a fictionalized depiction of a day in their life. The four of them are extremely charismatic screen presences, even more impressive given their lack of acting experience. I understand criticisms I’ve read of McCartney’s trying maybe a little too hard; I noticed that this time. I was also surprised that one or two of the tunes repeat which I’d never noticed before. The other obvious problems with the film are… Uhm… Well… Er… Yeah, I can’t think of any. There’s a great use of soft focus in some scenes which at first look like mistakes, but they’re repeated so I guess they’re deliberate. Unless the repeats are meant to throw off the mistakes? Who knows, who cares; they work.
What a joy this movie is. Of course there’s the music. Jack White said recently any musician who doesn’t get The Beatles isn’t a musician, he’s a poseur (I’m paraphrasing a bit). This is the first real Rock ’n’ Roll movie, the first movie completely by and about Rock ’n’ Rollers. It’s got that wonderful British humor, so like the Marx Brothers’. It’s also great because it lets us see The Beatles so early in their career and gives us the feeling that that’s really them. It’s very documentary that way. Great use of swish-pans, hand-held cameras, great documentary feel to the film. Brilliant masterful mix of the real with the scripted artificial. It comes off as improvised but it (mostly) wasn’t. The end result is it feels AUTHENTIC.
One of the best things I ever heard said about this movie was by the comedic actor Mike Myers, he of Austin Powers fame. In an interview he talks about how much he loves the movie, and when he first saw it he cried at the end, because as The Beatles rise up in a helicopter to go onto their next adventure, he wanted to go with them. That’s the feeling you get watching this. These guys are having the best time anyone can have and you want to be a part of it. I feel that still when I watch this movie, especially with this fantastic release.
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