JULY 6, 1964 – A charity premiere of the Beatles’ first film “A Hard Day’s Night” was held at London’s Pavilion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus with crowds lining up a full twelve hours early to buy tickets. The band themselves attend the premiere (on the eve of Ringo Starr’s 24th birthday and seven years to the day since John Lennon was introduced to Paul McCartney) and the reception afterward at the Dorchester Hotel with British royalty.Written by Alun Owen and originally released by United Artists. The film portrays several days in the lives of the group. Directed by Richard Lester, it set records at the London Pavilion by grossing over $20,000 in the first week, ultimately becoming so popular that more than 1,600 prints were in circulation simultaneously.The movie’s strange title originated from something said by Ringo Starr, who described it this way in an interview with disc jockey Dave Hull in 1964: “We went to do a job, and we’d worked all day and we happened to work all night. I came up still thinking it was day I suppose, and I said, ‘It’s been a hard day…’ and I looked around and saw it was dark so I said, ‘…night!’ So we came to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.”According to Lennon in a 1980 interview with Playboy magazine: “I was going home in the car, and Dick Lester suggested the title, ‘Hard Day’s Night’ from something Ringo had said. I had used it in ‘In His Own Write,’ but it was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo. You know, one of those malapropisms. A Ringo-ism, where he said it not to be funny… just said it. So Dick Lester said, ‘We are going to use that title.'”In a 1994 interview for The Beatles Anthology, however, McCartney disagreed with Lennon’s recollections, recalling that it was the Beatles, and not Lester, who had come up with the idea of using Starr’s verbal misstep: “The title was Ringo’s. We’d almost finished making the film, and this fun bit arrived that we’d not known about before, which was naming the film. So we were sitting around at Twickenham studios having a little brain-storming session… and we said, ‘Well, there was something Ringo said the other day.’ Ringo would do these little malapropisms, he would say things slightly wrong, like people do, but his were always wonderful, very lyrical… they were sort of magic even though he was just getting it wrong. And he said after a concert, ‘Phew, it’s been a hard day’s night.'” Yet another version of events appeared in 1996; producer Walter Shenson said that Lennon had described to him some of Starr’s funnier gaffes, including “a hard day’s night“, whereupon Shenson immediately decided that that was going to be the title of the film.Regardless of which of these origin stories is the true one, the original tentative title for the film had been “Beatlemania” and when the new title was agreed upon, it became necessary to write and quickly record a new title song, which was completed on April 16th , just eight days before filming was finished. John Lennon wrote the song in one night, basing the lyrics on a birthday card sent to his young son Julian, and it went on to win a Grammy for Best Performance by a Vocal Group.The film was titled “Yeah Yeah Yeah” in Germany, “Tutti Per Uno” (“All for One”) in Italy, “Quatre Garçons Dans Le Vent” (“Four Boys in the Wind”) in France, “Yeah! Yeah! Tässä tulemme!” (“Yeah! Yeah! Here We Come!”) in Finland and “Os Reis do Iê-Iê-Iê” (“The Kings of Yeah-yeah-yeah”) in Brazil.The film was a financial and critical success. Time magazine rated it as one of the all-time great 100 films. British critic Leslie Halliwell described it as a “comic fantasia with music; an enormous commercial success with the director trying every cinematic gag in the book” and awarded it a full four stars. The film is credited as being one of the most influential musical films of all time, inspiring numerous spy films, “The Monkees” television show and pop music videos.
