For all the ways that writers have anatomized the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day\u2019s Night, no one has approached it like Ahmed. An English broadcaster and the daughter of South Asian immigrants, she fell for the Beatles in 1979 at age 11 while watching videos of the band\u2019s films. She views A Hard Day\u2019s Night with an outsider\u2019s eyes, concluding from a scene in which she identifies several non-white Beatles concertgoers that \u201cBritain, for all its complicated social tensions, is captured in this film as having a multiracial reality.\u201d This dovetails with a prevailing, persuasive contention of Ahmed\u2019s: Unlike other British films of its time, A Hard Day\u2019s Night manages not to seem old-fashioned when watched today. The author devotes the book\u2019s first half to unpacking the movie\u2019s plot (thumbnail: The Beatles commute by train from Liverpool to London, so they can perform on a TV show); the book\u2019s latter half comprises chapters dedicated to, among other topics, and most illuminatingly, the film\u2019s women. As Ahmed observes, they\u2019re not just the screamers of the opening scene\u2019s train-station chase: Female characters have jobs that keep Beatles business humming. Ahmed submits that \u201cthe film, while always making clear that the Beatles are lively young heterosexual men, never relies\u2014in their encounters with females\u2014on promoting the kind of stereotype that has dated so many British social realist films of its time.\u201d Director Richard Lester\u2019s other, like-minded choices (such as to ditch a scene from the script that contained what Ahmed calls \u201cquestionable racial humour\u201d) reflect an aversion to mean-spiritedness, which may well be the key to why A Hard Day\u2019s Night remains such a pleasure, as is this incisive, nimble title.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For all the ways that writers have anatomized the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day\u2019s Night, no one has approached it like Ahmed. An English broadcaster and the daughter of South Asian immigrants, she fell for the Beatles in 1979 at age 11 while watching videos of the band\u2019s films. She views A Hard Day\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6570,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6569"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}