The Beatles by Bob Spitz

Author:Bob Spitz [SPITZ, BOB]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / General, Music / Genres & Styles - Pop Vocal
ISBN: 9780316031677
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

The premiere of A Hard Day’s Night wasn’t expected to be normal, even by movie-gala standards. By 7:30, an hour before curtain, the streets around Piccadilly Circus were jammed by a crowd of twelve thousand fans jockeying to get a glimpse of the stars. Inside the London Pavilion, the Beatles, dressed in stiffly pressed tuxedos and glossy patent-leather shoes, stood in the midst of their families and the posh crowd. Joining them were Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowden. Earlier that day the band had watched a run-through of the film at a private screening, with Brian, Derek, and Walter Shenson, who insists they “behaved like delighted little kids” watching themselves romp across the screen. Slouched down in the stalls, with their feet up on the backs of the seats in front of them, they wolfed down popcorn and howled like hyenas or groaned with embarrassment, depending upon the scene. Shenson, hunkered in the balcony, was confident that they had a monster hit on their hands.

With few exceptions, the critics agreed that A Hard Day’s Night was a winner. The Times called it “off-beat” and an “exercise in anarchy” with a spontaneity exceptional in British films. In the Daily Express, critic Leonard Mosley struck the same euphoric tone, calling it “delightfully loony” and adding “there hasn’t been anything like it since the Marx Brothers in the ’30s.” Later, Bosley Crowther, whose opinion in the New York Times was read like scripture, praised it as “a whale of a comedy” that “had so much good humor going for it that it is awfully hard to resist… with such a dazzling use of the camera that it tickles the intellect and electrifies the nerves.”

The Beatles preened unflinchingly in the afterglow. “I dug A Hard Day’s Night,” John said initially. “We knew it was better than other rock movies,” though “not as good as James Bond,” he relented. Later, in a puff of vengefulness, he backpedaled, saying, “By the end of the film we didn’t know what had happened and we hated it.” But by then it didn’t matter. On July 8 the movie opened to critical success and amazing business. The next morning there were lines around the block. United Artists blanketed Britain “with a record 160 prints of the picture” and was bragging to reporters that it “would gross at least a million pounds in Britain alone,” which wasn’t bad, considering the film cost less than a quarter of a million pounds to make. Publicly, the Beatles acted indifferent to the success. Still, at every opportunity, they cruised past the Pavilion to check on the length of the queues. Chris Hutchins, who accompanied them on just such a junket, remembered their delight at the lines snaking around the theater. “That’s the stuff!” he recalled John shouting from the backseat of a car a few days after the premiere. “A couple of hundred more for the sevens-and-sixes* and we’ll all be rich!”

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