Since this little essay seems to be the 200th movie review (to use the term loosely) published here on BillSaysThis, I thought I’d pair these two films about the mid-60s concert scene by what are arguably the two most important popular music acts of the era, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. I watched the former a few weeks back (thanks Pam for the present!) and the latter am still enjoying some of the DVD extras as I write this but was struck by the similarities and differences.
First off, both are Definitely Recommended as long as you think you’ll enjoy the music and not worth watching otherwise. Fortunately for me, I do very much. Second, don’t expect anything close to a normal movie in either instance: one was thrown together just to capitalize on the band’s popularity without time to plan or think things through and the other is an avant-garde documentary that makes no attempt to provide context or comfortable familiarity.
In A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles take an overnight train trip to London for a performance, joined by their road manager and Paul McCartney’s grandfather (actually a wiley old actor named Wilfred Brambell). Director Richard Lester in many scenes simply worked from a setup and suggested bit of action; even though Alun Owen wrote what many said was an excellent script, very little of his dialogue and staging was used.
The DVD has lots of extras and one that was particularly interesting to me was a series of interviews with people involved in organizing and making the movie (though none of the Beatles themselves participated). We find that the studio executives in America who provided the financing were mainly interested in getting a soundtrack record and its publishing rights; the go ahead was given before the group had made much of an impact in the States though their instant godhood via that first Ed Sullivan show performance came before filming began. Little did they realize…
From our perspective in 2003, Hard Day’s Night may seem amateurish and even a poor outing by the Fab Four (except, of course, for the actual music) given our familiarity with more modern efforts, especially the million dollar major label videos seen over the last decade or more but remember that in 1964 there was no such thing. Rock and roll in the movies was pretty much Elvis in whatever dreck Colonel Parker put in front of him and Frankie and Annette beach movies and music television was American Bandstand plus the occasional crumb of an appearance on Sullivan, who was more interested in his Broadway pals and circus acts. In fact, Lester lampoons the latter by having a dance troup and ‘plate spinner’ appear with the Beatles on a TV broadcast.
Mainly, the film has the boys (in their early 20s at the time) have fun with a bunch of situations: on board the train, getting from the station to the hotel, in the hotel room with each other and with room service, finding Grandpa when gets loose, backstage at the show, and even at a police station where they go to retrieve the old man. Absurdity, nonsense, and the occasional tip of the cap to Spike Jones and old school Peter Sellers.
Did I say mainly? Okay, that’s true in terms of minutes but the primary source of entertainment is the music, perhaps the peak of their early period, with Lennon and McCartney confident in their own writing abilities but still working within the existing forms. The title song, amusingly enough, wasn’t even written until after the filming when everyone was trying to figure out a name for the movie; when one was arrived at, Lennon came back the next morning with the complete song.
On the train, in fact, we’re also introduced to Patti Boyd as one of two girls that Paul tries to talk up but who end up flirting with Grandpa instead. Boyd took up with and then married George, later becoming the object of Eric Clapton’s unrequited affections when he wrote Layla for and about her, though she eventually gave in and left Harrison for him. Clapton, in his happiness, then wrote Wonderful Tonight for her.
Don’t Look Back is much more difficult to pin down; documentary maker DA Pennebaker completely ignores convention and simply edits together bits of film that he expects will, in sum, present a meaningful portrait of Bob Dylan. Shot in 1965, almost exactly a year after the Beatles’ movie, and also in black and white, Dylan is captured before he retreated into his shell, before he decided to essentially stop saying anything in public other than his lyrics (or even less connected to reality).
There is absolutely no inclusion of, say, captions to let the viewer know where some scene is taking place, except for the odd mention by a hotel staff or glimpse of signage such as on the approach to Royal Albert Hall. Pennebaker seems to have laid down on the back floor of limousines and simply wandered where he would with a small camera to get his shots, giving the film a radical perspective, an awesome feeling of simply being inside the space. Where Hard Day’s Night laid the foundation for two generations of rock films, Don’t Look Back had a more immediate impact as the rock festival films like Woodstock and Monterey Pop came out and took the Pennebaker style as their own.
I think that there must be hundreds or thousands of feet of unused footage filmed early on, before Dylan and his pals–mainly Joan Baez, Bob Neuwirth, Albert Grossman, and Marianne Faithfull–got used to the camera’s intrusiveness. Still, on screen Dylan is comfortable and has, for example, an outstanding exchange with a small-time British reporter sent to interview him. The singer turns the tables on the out of his depth young man, questioning him on life and his worth rather than simply responding to standard questions posed a thousand times before; one really gets a glimpse of his intelligence and twistedness.
Donovan (Leitch), just making a name for himself in England at the time of filming, comes up in conversation early in the film and then later on shows up in a hotel room where he and Dylan trade performances. Baez sings a few times as well, and Alan Price, who’d just left The Animals after playing keyboards on their hit House of the Rising Sun.
During the film itself, most of the stage performances are cut short, just excerpts, but the DVD has recordings of all five songs in the extra material; my favorite of them is It’s all Over Now, Baby Blue. Also added is an alternate version of the Subterranean Homesick Blues video which opens the movie–the one where Dylan stands there nonplussed and drops cards with a word or two from each line to the ground.
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