A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles' first movie, is, above all, a fun time and a chance to enjoy some great music; I wouldn't call it particularly plot-heavy. And yet, rewatching it recently, I noticed that the plot it does have is actually very solid, and follows some of the most basic principles to make sure your story works. It's actually quite different from, say, Magical Mystery Tour (which I greatly enjoy because I expect that one to just be a fun romp filled with music videos and no real story!) A Hard Day's Night, even though it's largely just a string of incidents that happen to follow one another, does tell a real story. For example:
The incidents all share a connecting thread
No matter what crazy things happen, or how out-of-the-blue they all seem – John meets a woman who appears to recognize him, John fools around in the bathtub and plays pranks on their road manager Norm, George almost gets recruited by a modelling agency – everything that happens revolves around this one specific TV concert the Beatles are scheduled to do. And we are constantly reminded of this TV concert, as everything the group does is tied into their schedule leading up to said concert, or how much time they have left before said concert is supposed to take place. For internal themes, pretty much everything the Beatles go through has something to do with the older generation not taking them seriously on account of their youth. Whether it's the older gentleman on the train who views sitting next to the Beatles as if they'd had some contagious disease, the modelling agency firing George for daring to state his own opinions instead of parroting theirs, or Norm and the television director talking about “locking the Beatles up” in the dressing room as though they're misbehaving pets and not grown adult men, the theme is always the same. The movie doesn't jump around from one message to another; everything that happens is, at its core, about the same thing: the older generation's response to the new Youthquake. (The irony is not lost on us that Paul's grandfather, probably the oldest major character in the film, in reality causes the most trouble of all!)
The movie has setup and payoff
Right near the end, the movie starts to concentrate on one specific plotline: Paul's grandfather has convinced Ringo that the rest of the band doesn't appreciate him, and now Ringo has walked off to do his own thing with the concert deadline looming closer than ever. (In Save The Cat terms, I would say this is the All Is Lost moment.) This may not have become a plot point until almost the third act, but we can hardly say the conflict came out of nowhere. Right from the beginning of the film, we have a scene where Ringo confesses to George that “he can tell Paul's grandfather doesn't like him” and says it's “because he's little”. George tells Ringo he has an inferiority complex, to which Ringo readily admits. This isn't the first time Paul's grandfather planted ideas in Ringo's head, either: all the other Beatles are teasing Ringo about having a big nose and then Paul's grandfather latches onto this and exacerbates it under the guise of defending Ringo; later in the same scene, when Ringo's fan mail is later in arriving than the other three's (his turns out to be the biggest pile of all), Paul's grandfather is quick to attribute Ringo's lack of fan mail to the size of his nose. There's also a scene where Ringo is upset that a stranger has been playing with his drums and the other Beatles cheer him up with a song, setting up the idea that, even if Ringo feels unappreciated by his friends and bandmates, at the end of the day they will always be there for him. Nothing in the third act of the movie comes out of nowhere; all of it was set up somewhere in the seemingly random events of the first and second acts.
Show, don't tell
For the movie's third act to work at all, we need to understand that Paul's grandfather is a troublemaker, that he delights in breaking up good relationships, and that he knows just what to say to make two former friends instantly suspicious of each other. So, the movie is sure to go beyond just telling us this. It does start off by just telling us: at the very beginning of the film, Paul explains to the other Beatles what a troublemaker his grandfather is, and he's definitely worried about the problems his grandfather might cause. But no one seems to believe him – any more than we would believe him if the movie had only ever told us this – until slowly, the evidence starts to come. Before the train ride is over, Paul's grandfather has already started a ridiculous running argument between road managers Norm and Shake about their heights (when, according to Paul, these two have “never had an argument in their lives”), convinced a pair of girls that the Beatles were dangerous convicts, and wandered off to become “engaged” to a woman none of them had ever met before. We also start this running thing of Paul's grandfather getting all the Beatles to sign some Beatles photos and then learning to forge their signatures so he can pass them all off as genuine. By the time Paul's grandfather convinces Ringo to leave the band, we are all good and convinced ourselves that he has what it takes to do it.
High stakes
Every story needs them. Even if the stakes aren't life-and-death (like they are in Help!, the Beatles' second movie, underneath all that wonderful silliness), the protagonists must always stand to lose something, and there must be a very real chance they might lose it. A Hard Day's Night does not use the fact that it's a string of random humorous events as an excuse to shy away from those precious high stakes that make a story worth following. In A Hard Day's Night, the stakes are very clear, perhaps even before the third act where all the trouble starts: the Beatles might miss their live television concert. What happens if they miss the concert? No one dies, sure, but they'd have to deal with huge crowds of disappointed fans, who would be too emotionally distraught for us to guarantee they wouldn't cause any damage. There would be a blot on the Beatles' reputation, a blot saying they aren't responsible, and can't be trusted by the very people they need to hire them. That blot would follow their careers for a long time, possibly forever. If they didn't find Ringo and convince him they really did want him in the group, they might have lost their friend as well. Basically, what the Beatles stand to lose if A Hard Day's Night ends badly is – the Beatles.
Emotional core
A Hard Day's Night ultimately comes down to the Beatles' friendship and unity – which at the beginning of the film is often used for solidarity when they are pitted against the prejudices of the older generation. We see this built up in a lot of little ways: George listening to Ringo talk about his inferiority complex, the Beatles all defending one another from the insults of the older gentleman on the train, John and the rest singing Ringo a song when he's upset about his drums being touched. Towards the end of the movie, when Paul's grandfather convinces Ringo to wander off on his own, we see a marked difference in how Ringo acts. He's doing very similar things to what the four Beatles together have been doing for fun this whole time; he should be having the time of his life, but he isn't. How can he be? His three best friends aren't with him and the whole reason he's out here is because he believes they don't care. He has no idea that his three friends have been doing nothing but searching for him since he left. It's honestly a very sad scene, adding depth to the otherwise full-on comedy. At the end, when Paul's grandfather tells Ringo he's going to get the other Beatles to come spring him out of the police station, Ringo can hardly believe they would actually come, a testament to how deeply Paul's grandfather's words had gotten to him. Although we don't see any kind of reconciliation, John, Paul and George breaking Ringo out of police custody is enough to break the spell – Ringo realizes his friends do care about him after all, the show goes on, and the day is saved.
It's quite fun to realize how, even in a lighthearted comedy like A Hard Day's Night, we can still see the care that went into making this not only a fun time, but a solid story as well!
댓글