A Hard Days Night.

• Author: Cohen, Mitchel
• Position: Beatles film reissued - Brief Article

It is hard to imagine today that most adults in the US in 1964 were horrified by the length of John, Paul, George and Ringo's hair, let alone the disgust my relatives displayed when those first clanging bars of John Lennon's rhythm guitar blasted out of the innovative "detachable speakers" of my Sylvania portable phonograph. (The other day my almost 12-year-old daughter, Malika, who lives with her mom on Long Island, insisted that there was no such word as "phonograph." "Okay, 'stereo,'" I responded. "No, don't you know anything? It's a 'CD player,'" she informed me.)

I was three years older than my daughter is today when the Beatles released their movie A Hard Day's Night and rocked into America, their pictures on the front page of the NY Times. "You can't tell if they're girls or boys," my grandfather said scornfully, and most everyone a generation older than me agreed with him. "By the time you get to be 20 you'll have grown out of it," I was told repeatedly.

So last Sunday evening I, at 51 and refusing to ever "grow out of it," made my way down to the Film Forum with my friend Cathryn after marching in the Free Leonard Peltier rally, to see the newly reminted A Hard Day's Night. Every show at the Film Forum is sold out an hour beforehand. The 180-seat theater is jammed with mostly white faces, some children, some 20s and 30s folks, but also many my age and even older. As I watched the 13-year-olds on the screen scream and cry and faint whenever one of the Beatles shook his mop-top, or glanced in their direction, I occasionally would turn around to watch the audience watching themselves 36 years later. My question is not "When did we lose such innocence?" but when did we get so Grown Up (ugh!) and repressed?

Of course every time the film flashed on the irreverent John Lennon everyone's eyes would mist--in my case come gushing those tears. Some quietly mouthed the words to the songs. But few in the theater sang out. No Rocky Horror here! No one got up and danced. No one screamed along with their 36-year-ago selves in the film. We're grown up now. We can't let this move us, or at least not let anyone see!

Of course, in the film, the Beatles were so ... well, so innocent! This is what all the adults were afraid of? As for us, I don't think we ever lost our innocence. It was trampled, beaten and shot in the back of the head execution-style. And not only by Vietnam, the murder of Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and the...