When I'm home, everything seems to be right.
When I'm home, feeling you holding me tight.
— The Beatles, A Hard Day's Night
In 1995, when I still believed there was an outside chance I would become a filmmaker, I made a $14.95 investment in a videotape of The Beatles' 1964 movie, A Hard Day's Night. For me, watching the film was like seeing Michael Jordan at his best: Director Richard Lester, the mop tops and an aging character actor named Wilfrid Brambell had caught each other in top form and put on a clinic of cinematic art. The movie was breezy and casual. Nothing about it stood up and screamed masterpiece. But Lester and The Beatles had done what great athletes do: They'd made it look easy.
That very ease—the thing we crave in our own lives and willfully forget is an illusion—kept the movie sharp in my mind for the next nine years while it sat in cardboard boxes, storerooms and garages up and down the West Coast. When my 3-year-old son, whose lone nutrition is music (God knows it isn't food), seemed ready to season his Wiggles habit with harder stuff this winter, I excavated the old tape. For five minutes of cheeky Beatletalk on a London-bound locomotive (Obnoxious Bourgeois Gentleman: "Don't take that tone with me, young man. I fought the war for your sort." Ringo: " I bet you're sorry you won"), my son watched skeptically, but then the lads set up shop in the train's animal car and started playing "I Should've Known Better." My boy was hooked; within two minutes he was echoing Ringo's drumbeat on an upturned tin trash can.
Now each evening my son greets me at the door with the words, "Let's watch some Beatles." He empties the waste tin and sets it up in the family room next to a toy tambourine, a plastic bongo and a top hat. For drumsticks, he uses a pair of blue drinking straws. For the next 108 minutes, he drums, comments ("John disappeared in the bathtub!"), and drums some more. I have now heard my son sing, "And when I tell you that I love you (oh—)/ You're gonna say you love me, too (ooh-ooh-oowoowoo)." I doubt I'll have three better experiences in my life.
In an interview at the end of the video, Lester says the film's youthful joy is also its serious message—a call for a revitalized and more idealistic postwar Britain. History can judge its success on that count. What I do know is that 40 years later, a little boy is filled with the film's boisterous energy. So is the little boy's father. And when I get home, and the drumming begins, everything seems to be right.