Director: Richard Lester
Starring: You know full well
Four stars out of five.
Revisiting this film might make you think that it’s going to be dull and dated, but AHDN retains its freshness and energy. The film is semi-documentary as it traces the four lads taking the train from the North (presumably Liverpool, though none of the film was filmed in the North) to London where they are to perform on the telly. Late in the film, Ringo derisively calls one local, “Southerner!”
Along the way they have light-hearted fun with the Older Generation. On the train, the guys have a barney with a middle-aged man who boasts that he had served in the war. Ringo retorts, “I’ll bet you’re sorry you won!” Later, British and German soldiers are seen as extras in a stage production of a war story, suggesting that a young generation saw it as a hackneyed form of entertainment (a sentiment later expressed: “I saw a film today, Oh boy . . . The English army had just won the war”).
Paul’s grandfather, unlike the older generation, still has a lot of vitality and disdain for the conventionality of the intermediary generation. Many of the people the guys conflict with are not so much older generation as they are older brothers — young men (road managers, studio people, ad people) who had missed out on the momentous social changes of the early 60s and had settled into uncreative lives. They just seem like the older generation.
There is a running theme of the guys breaking free of the structures people try to impose on them and going off to play their music. Motion, change, vitality, creativity, and disregard for convention are beginning to change the world.
The film makes no special effort to sell to American youth. It’s set completely in the UK. I can’t recall a single American. The accents are often hard to understand, as is some of the slang that crops up: “Barney” (argument, fight); “Bridewell” (police station, jail). I thought that this made the film more fun.
The final 15 minutes or so are of the telly concert, complete with screaming girls. Interestingly, Lester twice has a South Asian girl in center frame. Probably quite progressive in 1964. Not politically correct; that notion didn’t exist. Just a recognition of an aspect of modern Britain and the broad appeal of the Beatles.
The use of film and music obviously presages the music video. I recall an interview with Richard Lester in which he mentioned that MTV sent him a plaque naming him “Father of the Rock Video.” He wrote back demanding a blood test.
Copyright 2010 Brian M Downing