For Samira Ahmed, A Hard Day’s Night is much more than a Beatles film.
It’s a document of a country changing before its eyes, a snapshot of Britain in 1964 and of a young band whose irreverence, energy and sheer charisma seemed to belong to a bright new future. More than 60 years later, Ahmed believes the film still speaks to us because the Beatles were never simply stars. They represented something social and cultural that was happening around them. Ahmed, journalist and author, will discuss the film and her new book A Hard Day’s Night, part of the BFI Film Classics series, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Her fascination with the film began when she first saw it with her brother around 1979. “It was like another time. I think partly because it was black-and-white as well, and the whole thing about the film is that it’s a completely self-contained bubble, isn’t it?
“I didn’t really know who the Beatles were when I first watched that, but you’re immediately captivated by this group. So I think the power of the film is from the days when you couldn’t just screen stuff; it wasn’t easy to get hold of things. If you missed something, it was gone forever. Having an early video recorder and being able to rewatch and rewatch felt very precious indeed.”
“The Beatles represented working-class boys who knew their own worth”
That sense of discovery eventually developed into the book. Ahmed had also appeared on Chris Shaw’s I Am The Eggpod podcast, choosing A Hard Day’s Night as her subject, before taking the discussion to a live event at Opera Holland Park in 2024 to mark the film’s 60th anniversary.
“I talked more about the film and some of the ideas that I laid out; I could just see the audience kind of nodding.” It was then that Samira began to think there “might be a book”, but the discovery of an early Beatles recording sealed the deal.
“The big clincher for me was when I discovered the Stowe tape. The way that I reported that on (BBC) Front Row was very much a sort of social history story, and particularly getting emails from people who had said, ‘I didn’t care about The Beatles, but listening to your Front Row about the Stowe tape, I really loved that story.’I thought, no one has really approached the Beatles this way, partly as a social phenomenon, and why they broke out the way they did at the time they did.”
The recording, made at Stowe School in 1963, provides a remarkable glimpse of the Beatles before the world they would soon dominate had completely changed. Ahmed sees it as an important historical document because it catches the band between their early influences and the songwriting revolution that was about to pass.
At a British Library event, she played the tape to an audience that included some of the fans who had originally been at Stowe in 1963 listening to Love Me Do and Please Please Me.
“We got lots of the old schoolboys who’d been at the concert.
“It felt like we had a really good document about a very unusual concert. That’s the only evidence of how they were sort of straddling the old Hamburg R&B playlists and new compositions but also watching it with a live audience, a lot of whom were young people, there were people, a lot of 20 somethings had come out of curiosity or with their parents, watching over the course of that hour as you played the tape, the audience get more and more excited and enthralled, which is almost like repeating in real time what had happened at Stowe.”
If there is one Beatle Ahmed believes emerges in a different light from the film, it’s George Harrison. Firstly, for his acting, but also his relationship with cinema and in particular cult classics such as Withnail and I, would help define British cinema in the decades to come.
“I would say that George is the real discovery of the film as an actor, because he has this completely authentic anti-authority air about him, which was always the case.
“If you read about him as a child, where he would muck around with the school uniform and have his waistcoat tailored getting into real trouble because he’d defied the school uniform kind of dress codes. Some of that really comes across from this and the way he speaks in that advertising agency scene.
“They all fell in love with cinema; I love the fact that very quickly afterwards he becomes a big saviour of British independent film through Handmade Films and his great friendship with Eric Idle and the Python saving Life of Brian. If you look at the quartet of key films, including Mona Lisa, Withnail and I, Life of Brian, and Time Bandits, which are arguably the most loved films of the 80s, they didn’t really win awards; it’s all Merchant Ivory, but his films are the cult films that people adore and watch still. They capture something very important about being anti-authority and being very British.”
Ahmed’s own connection with the Beatles became more personal during her legal battle with the BBC.
Travelling into central London each day, walking across Waterloo Bridge to court, she found herself reconsidering what the Beatles’ rebelliousness meant to her.
“I was very wary of how much personal stuff I wanted to put into this book, but I thought it was legitimate to explain the starting point. It was the point where I really rethought about the film because I was getting on a commuter train every day to come into Waterloo, and I used to walk across Waterloo Bridge to court.
“I remember getting on the train home after the first day of giving evidence when my barrister said to me, ‘You must not talk to anyone, not even members of your family. Just put on some headphones or watch a movie, just don’t talk to anyone.’ I just got on the train, and I put on the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack, and the (title) track made me think of getting on that train with the Beatles and screaming. I realised they connected me to a sense of anti-authority ethics.”
The challenge to authority by the band themselves had a sense of right and wrong. “They weren’t rude for the sake of it; they stood up for each other, they stood up for fairness, and they didn’t believe that some people were better than others just because of their birth. I felt a deep connection to the spirit of the Beatles, which I realised had infected me as a child.
“They represented that sense of working class boys who knew their own worth, who stood up for themselves and believed in their own value. Anyone who’s ever fought a discrimination tribunal is kind of channelling that spirit where you know you’re as good as them, and you just want to be treated fairly.”
There is another reason Ahmed believes the film has endured. Look closely at the crowd scenes and the often imagined homogeneous Britain of 1964 begins to look quite different. There’s a South Asian girl and other people of colour captured in the film.
“What I loved about the way that the crowd scene is shot is it’s kind of incidental. She’s just a really interesting, enthused face in the audience, and so the camera zooms in. Once you start freeze-framing the film with these wonderful 4K restoration DVDs, you realise she’s not on her own. You can see a couple of other boys of colour, one of whom I think is mixed race, and another Asian schoolboy; it was just charming. I think for this first generation of British Asian and British black teenagers, the Beatles were part of them finding their tribe. The Beatles embraced soul music and R&B, particularly the music of African American girl groups like the Marvelettes.
“They represent this new modern multiracial Britain that is happy and content with itself.”
Ahmed is equally interested in what the film tells us about changing attitudes to women. She contrasts A Hard Day’s Night with other films of the period, arguing that its refusal to turn the Beatles’ story into a conventional romantic narrative is one of the reasons it has aged so well. Ahmed makes comparisons with other films of the time to suggest why A Hard Days Night has aged so well.
“The comparison I make is really with Billy Liar, which is a great film in its own way, but it has bits of blackface in it and the whole treatment of the three girlfriends is very, very sexist. It just felt like women were there as accessories to men; that has dated it.
“The other issue is how many terrible quality pop films there were. Ferry Across the Mersey not only comes out after A Hard Day’s Night, but it also has the same cinematographer. It’s a baffling, baffling film.”
Ringo Starr also delivers a memorable performance during the film.
Ahmed’s discussion of the drummer’s famous sequence by the river reveals another reason for the film’s enduring appeal. “He was completely hungover, and therefore he’s really understated. Richard Lester (director) was very practical; they cut the dialogue back much further, and he encouraged actors to come up with ideas. Perhaps the most revealing thing about Ahmed’s Beatles fascination is that it stops before the mythology becomes overwhelming.
“I’m a journalist, so my book is all about facts. My fascination with the Beatles is very much when they’re the ‘other’ Beatles, particularly the early years up to about ’65, ’66. When they start to turn introspective, and they’re all taking lots of drugs, I certainly lose interest in them as characters I’d like to hang out with.”
Before the Beatles became an institution, they were four young men moving at extraordinary speed through a Britain that was itself changing; perhaps that is why the film still feels alive, a magical moment captured.
“It’s the phenomenon of how it would have landed at the time with all these references and figures that were recognised from pop culture, and then the fact that it also somehow appears timeless because the Beatles have such star quality, they have such personal charm and charisma and their energy is what drives the whole film and Richard Lester very successfully worked out what to surround them with to capture them at their best.”
Samira Ahmed & Ian Leslie: Two of Us, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Saturday 22 August, 6.45pm, Venue T
A Hard Day’s Night by Samira Ahmed is out now
