Rescued by Rover (1905)
Yüklə 1,18 Mb.
|
- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- anniversary pictorial history , New York, Doubleday, 1992. Adrian Turner, The Making of David Leans ‘Lawrence of Arabia’
| Steven Caton, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’:A Film’s Anthropology, Berkeley, University of California, 1999.
L. Robert Morris and Lawrence Raskin, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’: the 30th anniversary pictorial history, New York, Doubleday, 1992. Adrian Turner, The Making of David Lean's ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Limpsfield, Dragon's World, 1994. ScreenOnline’s Lawrence of Arabia (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/477570/index.html) Britmovie’s Lawrence of Arabia (http://www.britmovie.co.uk/directors/d_lean/filmography/004.html) Freddie Gaffney A Hard Day’s Night (1964) [Production Company: Proscenium Films/United Artists. Director: Richard Lester. Screenwriter: Alun Owen. Cinematographer: Gilbert Taylor. Editer: John Jympson. Music: John Lennon, Paul McCartney. Cast: The Beatles, Wilfrid Brambell (Paul’s grandfather), Norman Rossington (Norm), John Junkin (Shake), Anna Quayle (Milie), Lionel Blair (TV Choreographer).] Although originally intended as little more than an ‘exploitation’ film, made hurriedly to cash in on the latest pop sensation whose fame was not expected to last, A Hard Day’s Night has instead proved to be a remarkably durable piece of film-making – just as the fame of its stars, The Beatles, has long outlasted their sixties heyday. The film was backed by the Hollywood studio United Artists who had already had a number of international commercial hits with films made in Britain such as the first of the James Bond franchise Dr No (Terence Young 1962) and the bawdy literary adaptation Tom Jones (Tony Richardson 1963), and were keen to develop the British-based arm of their operation. Like many other British films of the 1960s, A Hard Day’s Night should be regarded as an Anglo-American film rather than strictly British, for as Alexander Walker points out, ‘to talk of ‘British’ cinema in these years is to ignore the reality of what underpinned the industry – namely, American finance.’ (2005: 16) In Richard Lester, the film even had an American director, albeit one who had made his home in Britain. A child prodigy who had attended university as a teenager, Lester had already worked in television and advertising in America and Britain, and had also directed several films, including the pop film It’s Trad, Dad! (1962), when he took on A Hard Day’s Night. However, what most impressed the Beatles was his association with the anarchic comedy troupe the Goons (Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine), having directed and composed the score for their home-movie-turned-arthouse-hit The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film (1959) as well as overseeing their forays into television. Lester’s background in the surreal, establishment-mocking comedy of the Goons was one of the things that helped give A Hard Day’s Night a tone that was distinctly different from previous British pop films, like the well-behaved star vehicles for Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. Along with visuals influenced by the French New Wave and contemporary documentary, characterised by choppy hand-held camerawork and staccato editing (and the decision to film in black and white), Lester invented ‘a style which helped carry the group forward to another stage of development rather than pushing them into the arms of traditional show-business.’ (Murphy 1992: 136) Considerable credit for the breakthrough should also go to Alun Owen, the film’s scriptwriter, whose previous experience writing gritty television drama, often set in Liverpool (most famously his 1959 ITV play, No Trams to Lime Street) enabled him to bring a version of the Beatles to the screen that was sharply colloquial rather than soppily anodyne. However, Owen’s freedom to write that way was only achieved thanks to the efforts of producer Walter Shenson, who had learnt from the American success of his Ealing-esque comedy The Mouse That Roared (Jack Arnold 1959) that a very British movie could still be a transatlantic hit; it was Shenson who insisted on the Liverpudlian idiom being used in A Hard Day’s Night. As Alexander Walker points out, ‘a less resolute producer, whose confidence in local accents hadn’t been boosted by a fortune at the international box-office, might have yielded to pressure to give the film an American slant.’ (2005: 229-230) Shenson was also behind the decision to give each of the band members their own scene to overturn the idea of them as four indistinguishable mop-tops. He outlined his aims in an article for the Evening Standard in June 1964: ‘Get each boy on his own for a stretch of film and show him as an individual. Get away from any notion of the Beatles as a four-headed monster.’ (1) Both George’s and John’s solo moments revolve around mistaken identity (George is mixed up with an advertising stooge when he accidentally goes into the wrong room, John is recognised by a woman at the TV studio who then changes her mind and tells him that he doesn’t look very much like himself at all) while Ringo’s interlude, the longest and arguably most successful in the film, has him temporarily escaping from his duties to do normal things like go for a walk and have a drink in a pub. Wandering by the river, he chats to a truanting schoolboy whom he recognises as a fellow ‘deserter’. The sequence blends slapstick humour (Ringo’s attempts to play various games in the pub, from bar billiards to darts, all end in disaster) with an undertow of melancholy about the losses inherent in the proscribed lifestyle of a Beatle. Throughout the film, Ringo is depicted as the least self-assured, most vulnerable member of the band, and as George Melly noted, his ‘loveably plain’ persona provided ‘a bridge, reassuring proof that the Beatles bear some relation to ordinary people.’ (1972: 69) Paul is the only Beatle missing a solo scene – his planned scene, an encounter with an actress rehearsing her lines, was cut because it didn’t fit into the overall flow of the final film and held up the action too much. A Hard Day’s Night opens with a sequence focussed on rapid physical movement – George, John and Ringo running towards the camera, away from a hoard of screaming fans, to the accompaniment of the film’s title song – and a sense of perpetual motion dominates the film, right through to its final moments, in which the band leap onto a helicopter waiting to whisk them away to yet another engagement. The film’s loose episodic narrative is kept from meandering too much by what Lester calls its ‘time clock’ element (Gelmis 1971: 260), the countdown to the big event, their televised concert. But this is jeopardised by the sudden disappearance of Ringo, who goes AWOL after sly encouragement from Paul’s mischievous grandfather, ‘Mixing’ John McCartney (Wilfred Brambell), accompanying them on their tour. The inclusion of McCartney Senior was a smart move: he acts as an important dramatic catalyst by continually getting into scrapes and causing arguments. Brambell, an experienced stage and television performer, also brought a backbone of reliable professionalism to a film whose four main performers were all novices to acting. (2) Brambell’s character also utters what is perhaps the key line of dialogue in the film, complaining, ‘I thought I was getting a change of scenery and so far I’ve been in a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room.’ This deliberately echoes something Lennon said to Lester about their tour dates in Sweden; to him, Stockholm had been nothing more than ‘a plane and a room and a car and a cheese sandwich.’ (3) This is the obverse of the band’s continual movement from place to place: their state of near captivity in a succession of enclosed spaces (the car, the train carriage, the hotel room) because of their fame but also their tight promotional schedule. The film even shows them being bullied into spending their free evenings answering fan letters by their manager Norm (Norman Rossington) – the most obvious case of the film’s bowdlerisation of the Beatles’s real-life existence at the time, much more likely to involve groupies and drinking than letter-writing. The one unambiguous moment of freedom in the film comes when all four of the band clatter down the TV studio fire escape and go to a nearby playing field, to do some running and jumping (but hardly any standing still) while Can’t Buy Me Love accompanies their antics. Slow-motion and speeded-up footage are employed, along with aerial photography (about the only time in the film we get to see any outdoor space) and the film’s familiar techniques of handheld camera and rapid editing, to create what Neil Sinyard calls ‘a definitive short ballet of youthful high spirits.’ (1985: 25) But even this is curtailed when a groundskeeper turns up to tell them they’re trespassing on private property – a moment that Stephen Glynn compares to the arrival of the policeman at the end of Gene Kelly’s rain-dance in Singin’ in the Rain (2005: 72); another authority figure interrupting a display of joyous physical exuberance. This moment of mutual misunderstanding could be read as an example of the widening generation gap which reached its zenith in the 1960s. The most notable example of this in A Hard Day’s Night is the confrontation at the beginning of the film between the band and a pompous commuter on the train. He asserts his right to have the window closed because he travels regularly on the train (even though all the other occupants of the carriage want it kept open) and reminds the boys ‘I fought the war for your sort’, to which Ringo pithily replies ‘I bet you’re sorry you won.’ Perhaps more sinister is the attempt of the older generation to appropriate and capitalise upon youth culture, as illustrated by George’s brief encounter with the advertising executive who hands him a couple of shirts and informs him ‘you’ll like these, you’ll really dig them, they’re fab and all the other pimply hyperboles’, although George tells him that they’re ‘grotty’ (a word Alun Owen made up for the occasion) and refuses to be taken in by the older man’s hard sell. But compared to a later 1960s film such as If… (Lindsay Anderson 1968), the existence of a generation gap is gently hinted at rather than central to the drama, and the most anti-authoritarian, rebellious figure in the film is Paul’s granddad. The film reaches its climax with the successful televised concert, echoing their actual career-making appearances on British TV; as Glynn recounts, ‘15 million watch[ed] them top the bill on Sunday Night at the London Palladium (13 October 1963) while 26 million saw their appearance on the Royal Variety Performance (4 November 1963).’ (2005: 65). The final concert also provides an important showcase for several of the soundtrack album’s songs, as well as replaying older favourites like She Loves You. During that track, the camera swish-pans across the screaming audience and picks out individual cameos, including one blonde haired girl to whom it returns several times as her state of frantic excitement tips over into tearful melancholy, suggesting a darker side of the young women’s orgiastic adoration of the Beatles. A Hard Day’s Night is the definitive visual document of Beatlemania at its height, showing both the passionate pursuit of the fans but also the difficulty for the band of being, to use Lester’s apposite phrase, ‘revolutionaries in a goldfish bowl’ (Gelmis 1971: 316). The film continues to exert an influence on contemporary film-making (most obviously perhaps in Spiceworld: The Movie (Bob Spiers 1997), which closely follows its ‘day-in-the-life of a band’ template) and Lester’s influence on the nascent form of the music video was openly acknowledged by MTV who sent the director a scroll declaring him to be the father of the channel. But the film’s ultimate achievement is to encapsulate what the Beatles brought to British (and later international) popular culture in the 1960s, ‘the emergence of a new spirit: post-war, clever, nonconformist, and above all cool.’ (Melly 1972: 75) Notes
Further Reading Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar, London, Secker and Warburg, 1971. Stephen Glynn, A Hard Day’s Night, London, I.B. Tauris, 2005. George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972. Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, London, BFI, 1992. Neil Sinyard, The Films of Richard Lester, London, Croom Helm, 1985. Alexander Walker, Hollywood England, London, Orion, 2005. Melanie Williams Yüklə 1,18 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|