I went to bed not knowing if I would go to work the
following day. When I awoke 10 hours had
passed, probably the longest stretch of sleep I’d had in about a year, but the
pain remained. I was also very
weak. I didn’t know what had happened but
I was obviously going to stay at home.
So what to do? Writing, or at least the ability of producing
something intelligible, is seriously diminished. I find it almost impossible to listen to music,
read (or do both simultaneously) whilst bedridden and daytime TV is simply
awful. “M” is still home but is herself either sleeping and, in any case, is
being visited by a colleague. Clearly there is only one thing to do and I look
for a decent DVD to watch that “M” would not want to view. We share broadly identical tastes in movies and
so a music themed item is usually the way to go. Somehow I’m unaffected by the prospect of watching music whilst sick. And what I watched is an acknowledged movie classic;
(AV15) The Beatles –
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Before this movie was released, movie vehicles for pop or rock
stars were cheap quickie jobs intended to cash in on the popularity of the star
of the moment. No doubt this movie was
conceived with the same expectation but the end result, courtesy of director
Richard Lester, was something else. With
what appears to be the active participation of the band, Lester was able to
subvert the already clichéd square-adults-view-the-"kids"-music-with-disdain-only-to-see-the-light plot line into something that could easily be mistaken for a
documentary.
The plot line is deceptively simple; a 24 hour period in the
life of The Beatles. It starts mid-afternoon
with them fleeing fans at a railway station and then goes on to show them taking a train
to their next TV engagement the following day, attempting to amuse themselves that
night, performing on the TV program and then departing mid-afternoon
for their next adventure. Strategically, relatively unimportant features
are included to remind people that this isn’t a documentary – the plotline
involving Paul McCartney’s grandfather played by Wilfrid Brambell, the use of
actors to portray The Beatles managers rather than Brian Epstein and, by this
stage, probably their use of public transport. But Lester ensured that more than enough
material was injected to make people understand The Beatles life was a hard
one. The elaborate attempts to escape
the fleeing packs at the railway station or to enter venues, their retreat on
the train to the luggage compartment, the claustrophobic scene inside a car
surrounded by screaming fans or even the sheer amount of fan mail that their “managers”
demand they all answer individually show the pressure they were under. (It’s little
wonder Ringo goes off the rails at one point. Lennon's and Harrison's sense of humour is also given an understandable context.) And yet,
despite their charisma and talent they do not ultimately win over everyone they
come across, including the clearly unimpressed business traveller who resents
having to share the train compartment with them or the director of the TV
special.
But the beauty of the film is that you can choose to ignore
the significance of such features if you wish and simply take it as an
entertaining romp containing some of the best of The Beatles early work. And certainly their performance on the “TV
special” was probably the closest that the vast majority of their early fans
ever got to seeing them in concert.
But that was it, musically speaking for my day, as more
sleep intruded. By day’s end my
condition had not improved much and I went to sleep wondering whether there
would be an improvement in the morning…..
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