In 1963, when film producer Walter Shenson was making low-budget comedies in London, United Artists Films asked him to make a cheap movie starring four young singers who were very popular in Britain but virtually unknown in the United States. The result was A Hard Day's Night (1964), the film that helped propel the Beatles to worldwide fame and launch a cultural revolution.
A Hard Day's Night was re-released in theaters this winter to new rounds of acclaim. Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Roger Ebert called it "joyous and original."
Although his other notable film, The Mouse That Roared (1958), made actor Peter Sellers a star, Shenson, '40, always considered his Beatles movies -- he produced Help! in 1965 -- his best work. Shot in black-and-white documentary style, A Hard Day's Night chronicled a fictional day in the life of the band, featuring a title song that became a No. 1 hit. Shenson plucked the title from an offhand comment by Ringo Starr and asked John Lennon and Paul McCartney to write a tune incorporating Starr's "hard day's night" phrase.
Shenson, who died in October a few weeks before A Hard Day's Night was re-released, was involved with dozens of films over the years; "but his very favorite, practically the love of his life, was A Hard Day's Night," says Paul Rutan, whom Shenson commissioned in 1966 to restore the Beatles films.
