ABSTRACT
A Hard Day's Night is the first of a four-film deal that manager Brian Epstein negotiated for the Beatles with United Artists. Their initial interest in the film was mainly to cash in on a soundtrack album as Beatlemania gripped the UK and USA in early 1964. Producer Walter Shenson had never heard of the Beatles but was won over by their natural charm and charisma on meeting them and proposed a semi-documentary film based on a day in the lives of the Beatles, with the group playing themselves. The film has been described as a sort of comic-strip version of the Beatles, with often-repeated references to the Marx Brothers. It can, however, be read as a cleaned-up version of reality, the loveable mop-tops as people wanted them to be: There's no shagging or drugging in A Hard Day's Night, but the Beatles smoke lots of ciggies and letch after schoolgirls.
