On this day in 1964, there was a very special release put into the American box offices. The film which had everyone talking in the summer of ’64 starred ‘John, Paul, George and Ringo’—The Beatles had taken America by storm and Beatlemania was in full effect when their feature film A Hard’s Day Night hit the cinema.

While 54 years may have passed but the impact of the band is still widely felt, not only through modern music but a modern culture in general. One thing from The Beatles‘ career that is very clear to align with today’s pop stars is the hysteria they created, which if anything, was far larger back in the ’60s.

Unlike today, the fans of bands didn’t have the immediate access to their icons via social media or television, no back then the fans demanded more and more of what they could read in the papers and hear on their records and radios. They wanted a film.

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So came A Hard Day’s Night and the continued, meteoric rise of The Beatles. “The Beatles in their feature film debut, one of the greatest rock-and-roll comedy adventures ever,” the official film synopsis reads. “The film has a fully restored negative and digitally restored soundtrack. The film takes on the just-left-of-reality style of mock-documentary, following ‘a day in the life’ of John, Paul, George, and Ringo as fame takes them by storm.”

The film, like everything The Beatles touched, was a critical and commercial success. The project has since been credited as being one of the most influential musical films of all time, inspiring numerous future cinematic pictures.

We thought we’d bring you some of the best images from that moment in history sampled via Blue Jay Way, a fan site for The Beatles:

The screenplay, written by Alun Owen, was specifically thought out and Owen was picked due to his past work on his play No Trams to Lime Street, and his understanding of the Liverpudlian dialogue.

“Alun hung around with us and was careful to try and put words in our mouths that he might’ve heard us speak, so I thought he did a very good script,” Paul McCartney once explained.

Apparently, after spending a fair few days living alongside the band in order to understand their lives in more detail, The Beatles told Owen that they lived like “a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room.” This fact in itself suggests why certain themes of the film touch on the aspect that The Beatles had become prisoners of their own fame.

Richard Lester, director of the film, once said: “The general aim of the film was to present what was apparently becoming a social phenomenon in this country. Anarchy is too strong a word, but the quality of confidence that the boys exuded.”

He added: “Confidence that they could dress as they liked, speak as they liked, talk to the Queen as they liked, talk to the people on the train who ‘fought the war for them’ as they liked. … [Everything was] still based on privilege—privilege by schooling, privilege by birth, privilege by accent, privilege by speech. The Beatles were the first people to attack this… they said if you want something, do it. You can do it. Forget all this talk about talent or ability or money or speech. Just do it.”

Source: Blue Jay Way