The real joke that made it into The Beatles movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’
One of the reasons that A Hard Day’s Night worked so well as a film was because of its naturalism. The Beatles didn’t have to be anybody but themselves during filming, and that real-life charm managed to come through in the film’s dialogue as much as it did through the group’s musical performances.
Screenwriter Alun Owen was nominated for an Academy Award for his script, but according to his recollections, the members of the band were as responsible as he was for the film’s lines. Owen spent a few days with The Beatles on the road, and their shared experiences provided most of the plot, dialogue, and setting for the film.
“Alun hung around with us and was careful to try and put words in our mouths that he might’ve heard us speak,” Paul McCartney later claimed, “So I thought he did a very good script.” When Owen came up blank in certain sections, he didn’t even try to fictionalise the script, instead directly lifting certain sayings and happenings from the band’s actual experiences.
That’s how Wilfrid Brimley’s comment of being stuck “in a train and a room, and a car and a room, and a room and a room” came about. It’s also how John Lennon’s slightly surreal interaction with actress Anna Quayle came about. But when it came to simply rehashing old jokes, the press conference scene provided the perfect setting.
The set-up was simple: The Beatles are put in front of reporters who ask them questions while they respond with comical answers. It wasn’t any different to how the band usually took on reporters, and so naturally, some of their real-life responses became perfect fodder for the scene.
One interaction between Ringo Starr and a reporter has the drummer asked if he’s a mod or a rocker. Starr slyly combines the two and insists he’s a “mocker”. The line was a verbatim retread of a response that Starr gave on the BBC programme Ready Steady Go!, with Starr admitting that Lennon was the one who originally came up with the phrase.
Even the film’s title famously originated from one of Starr’s malapropisms. It was the off-the-cuff nature of The Beatles that made them the perfect subject of the film in the first place, but when it came to actually realising their characters on screen, the members had plenty to say about what they were actually going to say.
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