The Historic Artcraft Theatre auditorium is lit dimly by the screen showing a repetitive sequence of local businesses’ ads, promotions and PSAs. It is early and not too difficult to find a row of six unoccupied seats in the slowly filling space. We find a bank of seats, and we all settle in.
It is almost like time-traveling. Imagine, in 1964, 60 years ago, I was settling into a similar seat in the theater darkness of the Greenwood Community House, my young teenage self giddily anticipating the start of The first Beatles movie, A Hard Days Night.
Tonight I am sure I will be able to mentally recite some of the dialogue. Memories of scenes that I have kept with me for these many decades will become fresh again as they play out on the big screen. Specific details will reaffirm and perhaps even add to the cache of Beatles trivia I have collected over my life.
I will watch for the scene where model/actress Patti Boyd is sitting with her friends in a train compartment and is hit on by Paul wearing a borrowed derby hat. Patti would later marry George and then leave him for Eric Clapton to become his “Layla.” This relationship triangle is Beatles trivia 101.
Tonight I will watch with my guitar-playing eyes. At that point in 1964, The Beatles were just starting to motivate me to pick up the six-stringed instrument that would go on to shape my life in so many ways.
After the film, my musical partner Retro Dan — who is sitting next to his wife Helen a few seats down from me — will trade observations about which Beatle played which instruments on which songs in the movie. We will discuss this all the while knowing from books read over the years that the instrumental configuration we see on the screen might not be the same way it was on that particular song in the recording studio. It is a movie, not a documentary, after all.
During the movie I laugh at the silly dialogue once again, thinking in my mind how funny, how much at ease, how cool the Fab Four are in the movie. From this vantage point 60 years on, I can see the beginnings of a youthful anti-authoritarian attitude. I see this from the jokes, the witty repartee, the slightly mocking tone of their youth as they deal with adults in power.
In 1964, young people already were starting to use humor and resistance to push back against the Powers That Be. In the movie, I see it was a gentle, fun-loving resistance. As the decades went on, as I remember, it would not be so gentle and fun-loving.
By the time we arrive at the scene where The Beatles “escape” from the television theater where they are scheduled to perform, I am totally immersed in the film. As the band runs and jumps around unrestrained in the open field with “Can’t Buy Me Love” jangling in the background, I am running right there in the field with them.
The message I was getting back then, at least subliminally, was:
Your life can be like this.
Your life should be exuberant, filled with joy and of your own choosing.
And it turns out that and as the song tells us, money has very little to do with it. I believe I have tried — sometimes successfully; sometimes not — to live up to this lifestyle.
But these are the considerations of someone who has lived for 60 years after A Hard Days Night came out. I am sure 60 years ago sitting in the Greenwood Community House I wasn’t thinking this way. I likely wasn’t thinking of anything other than: “Oh, boy. I am sitting in this theater and I am going to see the Beatles in a movie. What could be better than this?”
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
