60s Bands on Film is a passion project of mine that I felt deserved an introduction. Following the success of A Hard Day’s Night, several other bands tried to replicate The Beatles and their overwhelmingly popular venture into film (and The Beatles made a few more, too). This leads to a fascinating albeit small collection of films featuring popular and iconic musicians of the times, most British Invasion artists (with a few notable exceptions), trying their hand at adapting their music and personas for a visual medium.
In my 60s Bands on Film series, I will go through each of these films and discuss the band and the movie in tandem, all while seeking to contextualize these films in their time and gain a broader understanding of this fascinating subgenre as a whole. This may end up as a ranking or just as a general study- I am open-ended and just excited to see where the movies and music take me. As a huge fan of both film history and 60s music, I am eager to embark on this project.
It all started when I revisited A Hard Day’s Night a few weeks ago. I forgot how iconic it was, and the magic of the film and how it weaved such legendary music into it totally entranced me. A good friend of mine who is a huge Herman’s Hermits fan joked that I needed to watch their films from that time, too, and this project was born. I wanted to watch the ten movies that came as direct descendants of A Hard Day’s Night, enjoying the music and these unique glimpses of some of the most iconic musical artists of all time. I hope you enjoy this series as much as I anticipate doing it.
Below is a list of the films I plan to cover in this series, in order by year, but the review order will be different. I know there are many movies from this decade that have cameos by other popular musical acts of the time, but for this series, I am focusing just on A Hard Day’s Night and the ten films that came afterward in the decade that followed the same formula of having a popular music group play the lead roles and drive the plot of a narrative (so no documentaries like Let It Be), whether or not they were playing “themselves.” This will include Yellow Submarine because, despite The Beatles not voicing themselves, it features them as characters and their music. It is an exception, but one I will include.
As a second note, the most famous descendant of A Hard Day’s Night is the television show The Monkees. The show, initially shelved, was reinitiated after the success of A Hard Day’s Night and portrays a band that is essentially a parody of The Beatles, so it does deserve mention in this discussion because it is perhaps the most direct response to the film. However, while I would love to talk about the show in more depth, for the sake of this project and its narrower scope, I will only include the 1968 film Head starring The Monkees.
Without further adieu:
60s Bands on Film Project
1. A Hard Day’s Night (1964) starring The Beatles
2. Ferry Cross the Mersey (1965) starring Gerry and the Pacemakers
3. Catch Us If You Can (1965) starring The Dave Clark 5
4. Help! (1965) starring The Beatles
5. Hold On! (1966) starring Herman’s Hermits
6. The Ghost Goes Gear (1966) starring The Spencer Davis Group
7. Good Times (1967) starring Sonny and Cher
8. The Cuckoo Patrol (1967) starring Freddie and the Dreamers
9. Magical Mystery Tour (1967) starring The Beatles
10. Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter (1968) starring Herman’s Hermits
11. Yellow Submarine (1968) featuring The Beatles
12. Head (1968) starring The Monkees