A Hard Day's Night 50th anniversary - The story behind the Beatles' pop masterpiece

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Fifty years ago US film distributors fancied making a quick buck exploiting a British band they dismissed as a passing fad. They wanted a low-budget film about The Beatles to be thrown together in a few weeks to cash in on “a brief craze”, reports the Sunday People.

But baffled by the Scouse accents, they demanded the Fab Four were dubbed with mid-Atlantic voices. Fortunately for all of us Paul McCartney refused, saying: “If we can understand f***ing cowboys talking Texas, they can understand us talking Liverpool.” The result was the Oscar-nominated box-office smash A Hard Day’s Night, made for just £200,000 using hand-held cameras and now considered the greatest rock’n’roll film ever made. And it is set to win a new generation of fans when a digitally remastered cinema version is released across Britain and America on Friday to mark its golden anniversary. Today the 87-minute black and white film is ranked in the world’s top 100. But in 1964 The Beatles were reckoned to be no more than nine-day wonders. United Artists only agreed to distribute a Beatles’ movie in America if it was made quickly.