The short film that inspired The Beatles to make their first movie
Every pop star had a film in the 1960s, even the ones that weren’t really that famous, but the ones that stand out as the best of the era are those featuring The Beatles. The quartet released four narrative-driven films during their lifespan; the black-and-white Marx brothers-style comedy A Hard Day’s Night, the delightfully messy Help!, the completely bonkers TV special Magical Mystery Tour, and the animated adventure Yellow Submarine.
Of the four, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night is the best. It is packed full of iconic scenes of the band being chased by mobs of girls, genuinely hilarious jokes, and, most importantly, it was made before the group had been seriously burned out, so their performances are much stronger than in Help! It ended up being nominated for two Academy Awards and is regarded today as one of the greatest British movies of the 20th Century. It’s a remarkable piece of film, and it owes its existence to a 11-minute short from five years earlier.
In 1959, British comedian Peter Sellers and American director Richard ‘Dick’ Lester made The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. It’s a series of non-sequitur sketches set in the English countryside, including a woman mopping a meadow, a man shooting a hammer out of the sky like a clay pigeon, and someone being beckoned towards the camera and then getting punched in the face. It cost £70 to make (around £1,384 in today’s money) and would probably be forgotten today if it hadn’t become a favourite of the lads from Liverpool.
When it came to making their own movie, The Beatles wanted the guy who had made the short that they all found so funny. “We held out for someone good and Dick Lester’s name came up,” said Paul McCartney (via Paul Du Noyer). “We found out he’d made The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, which was kind of surreal for its time… You’d never seen those kind of things then, so that was one of our cult little films: ‘Wow, that’s great, that’s a student’s film, that is!’ So we were very chuffed that he was interested.”
The influence of Lester’s earlier work is plain to see in A Hard Day’s Night. The sequence set to ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, which sees the band literally running and jumping around in a field, is precisely the sort of thing Sellers, Spike Milligan, and the rest of the cast were doing in 1959. This scene is easily one of the most memorable and influential in the entire film.
A Hard Day’s Night marked the beginning of a successful relationship between Lester and The Beatles, as he returned to shoot Help! in 1965. He also directed the 1967 black comedy How I Won the War, which starred John Lennon in his only non-musical acting role. In 1991, Lester reunited with McCartney to direct Get Back, a concert movie of his 1989-90 world tour. Outside of the Fabs, Lester is perhaps best known for directing three ‘Superman’ movies and three films based on Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.
The fact that The Beatles were even aware of The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film shows how plugged in they were to alternative culture and how keen they were to have their own work deviate from what was expected. Whilst he isn’t quite ‘Fifth Beatle’ level, Lester undoubtedly played a huge role in shaping the group’s tastes and, later on, helping them achieve their artistic visions.
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