A Hard Day’s Night

Richard Lester made A Hard Day's Night in 1964, at the very peak of Beatlemania. It was meant as a quick cash-in on a pop phenomenon. It ended up with two Academy Award nominations and changed what a musical could be. Shot in crisp black and white over a few frantic weeks, it follows the band through a mock day in their impossibly hectic lives.

John, Paul, George and Ringo play exaggerated versions of themselves, and their deadpan Liverpudlian wit carries scenes that Alun Owen wrote to fit each personality, with Wilfrid Brambell as Paul's troublemaking grandfather. Lester drew on the French New Wave and on his own background in anarchic television comedy, filming the songs and the slapstick with handheld energy, jump cuts and restless visual invention. In doing so he more or less created the template for the music video a generation before MTV.

It was a hit with critics and audiences alike, and it shaped pop cinema for decades, from The Monkees to the modern concert film. It is fast, joyous and weightless in the best sense, and it keeps the Beatles at the giddy height of their fame, before the world and their own ambitions complicated everything. Few films have caught so well the brief pleasure of being young, gifted and adored, and it proved that a quick commercial cash-in could, in the right hands, become lasting art.