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...

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS * THE HARD WORD * FRIDAY NIGHT I have often been asked the difference between movie reviews and film criticism; and after much thought, I've decided the answer is about one week. That's my excuse, anyway, for not having...

Ed Sullivan introduced Americans to the Beatles, but "Help!" was the first time they saw the Fab Four in color. It may not sound like a big deal in an age of HDTV, but in 1965, at the height of Beatlemania, it was something to...

Imagine that. A lock of John Lennon's hair sold for $48,000 Wednesday in an auction of Beatles' memorabilia collected by the band's hairdresser.The hair — inside an autographed copy of Lennon's book "A Spaniard in the Works" — sold to an unnamed telephone bidder.Gorringes auction...

[A Hard Day's Night] is a shining illustration of the often untenable maxim about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. In the first place the Beatles themselves collectively, as a group and governing ungrammatically the singular verb, is (or are) clearly much more than simple Paul, John, George and Ringo. The same principle holds good for the film, which, broken down into its individual components, is pretty poor and insipid stuff. It is not in the conventional sense well written, havin...

[The] three motifs introduced during the early moments of [A Hard Day's Night]—running (flight), antagonism towards the establishment (order), and subsequent mayhem (misrule)—are extended by variation throughout the remainder of the action. The unifying tension is that which exists between the harried manager of the troupe … and his obstreperous charges, a good-natured badinage which has, as always in such cases, an underlying darkness. The Manager wants them to "behave,&#...