News The Beatles movie John Lennon was “infuriated” working on: “The shittiness of the dialogue”
There’s a good chance that every member of The Beatles has a few too many horror stories about Beatlemania. The idea of millions of fans chasing after you might seem thrilling for a while, but there comes a point where it starts to become a bit too chaotic for anyone to control for too long. John Lennon had had enough of that fame machine pretty quickly, and once they transitioned into their movie roles for A Hard Day’s Night, he was absolutely appalled by what he saw.
For Lennon, the silver screen was the natural progression after taking over the world. I mean, Elvis and Little Richard had made cameos in feature films and brought rock and roll to movie theatres everywhere, so what’s the difference between them and the Fab Four having a film of their own.
If they were to make a movie, it wouldn’t be the traditional jukebox musical that everyone got tired of years ago. This had to be artistic, but Lennon didn’t take kindly to what Alun Owen had when he was brought in as a screenwriter. Instead of being able to flex his acting chops, Lennon was being asked to play a heightened version of himself, which never exactly clicked for him.
When talking about his experience in the first Beatles movie, Lennon remembered being furious at the script, saying, “We insisted on having a real writer to write it. We knew [Alun’s] work and said he was all right. He was a phony. He was like a professional Liverpool man. We were a bit infuriated by the glibness of it and the shittiness of the dialogue, and we were always trying to get it more realistic.”
Then again, the more fantastical sequences in the film are half of what makes it great. While it’s clear that the band are just mouthing along to the words whenever they sing their songs, their energy working off the dialogue is absolutely electric, culminating in the famous scene where they run around a field to the tune of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.
Compared to all the other Beatles films, this is also one of the few that dares to have an actual plot involved. Even though the movie is meant as a vehicle for the songs, seeing the band get into shenanigans with Paul’s grandfather is surprisingly funny in spots, with both Lennon and George Harrison standing out as some of the wittiest on set.
If Lennon was frustrated by a lack of direction on the first one, you could understand why he had tuned out by the time they made Help! Since he didn’t want to make the movie in the first place, seeing Lennon serving as the de facto leader of the band while being stoned out of his mind on set feels like the precursor to the stoner film genre of the 2000s, especially when he decides to take the piss instead of deliver a convincing performance.
For Lennon, all that he needed to express himself was in his songs, and no amount of camera work would do justice to him, as well as having a guitar in his hands and singing what was in his heart. A Hard Day’s Night is still a ton of fun, but once you’ve gone beyond teenage fun to tracks like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, it’s harder to look back through rose-coloured wire-rimmed glasses.
