A case might be made that a cinema without conventional artistic ambitions would be the purest form of cinema possible.  Its visual aspect would aspire to delight and interest without convincing anyone that its images were aesthetically valuable in themselves.  Its narrative aspect would aspire to engage without convincing anyone that the drama it served was profound or important.  It would reduce every aspect of cinema to the absolute essence of cinema’s appeal — moving pictures of interesting places and people that tell a coherent and involving story just for its own sake.

From this viewpoint, many of the movies starring Elvis Presley would rank as the purest sort of cinema.  They consist of images crafted by highly competent technicians which are pleasing to look at and often very interesting as photographic records.  Their narratives have no pretensions to dramatic profundity but are diverting and amusing.  They are set in interesting places, a mix of actual locations and studio sets that meticulously recreate actual locations with daring artificiality.  They are all organized around a personality with a riveting screen presence and a spectacular talent — singing — who is fascinating to watch quite apart from his skills as an actor impersonating a character.

Many Elvis movies fail to deliver any of the elements we normally expect cinematic “art” to deliver, yet they are exhilarating phenomena all the same.  They reduce commercial narrative cinema to its essence, and remind us that the essence of commercial narrative cinema has a high value in its own right.  They are great and admirable because they are intensely fun and fascinating and pleasing without pretending to be anything other than intensely fun and fascinating and pleasing.

Check out Twilight Time’s new Blu-ray edition of the Elvis movie Follow That Dream.  It is intensely fun and fascinating and pleasing.  It is pure cinema.

A Hard day’s Night, 1964.

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When Francis Ford Coppola heard this album of electronic music from 1974 he tried to hire its composer, Tomita, to do the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now.  When Tomita proved unavailable, Coppola got his father Carmine to compose soundtrack cues then had them transposed into electronic versions.

Snowflakes Are Dancing is mostly melodic and lush, but the edgier cuts have an unsettling quality which is probably what got Coppola’s attention.  It’s not really my kind of music, but it has its charms and fascinations.

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The reputation of A Hard Day’s Night gained a lot from the film’s being better than it had any right or reason to be.  Made quickly on a relatively modest budget, it was designed to cash in on the astonishing worldwide popularity of The Beatles.  It would have served its commercial purposes adequately by being a bit of mediocre pop fluff.  Instead, it was a bit of superior pop fluff.

A faux documentary about a day in the life of the lads, it seamlessly incorporated surreal images and transitions, varied and innovative presentations of the musical numbers, daffy Goon-Show humor, and social satire.  In the process it captured the high spirits and self-mocking attitude of The Beatles themselves, making it a perfect setting for their joyful and expertly crafted songs, which were really the point of the whole exercise.

The Beatles on screen were sometimes quite skillful comedians, sometimes awkward and amateurish, like kids showing off in home movies.  It’s fascinating to watch them in either mode, impossibly young as they were then, the hottest act in international show business, becoming very rich, and enjoying it all as a fab lark.

It’s depressing to compare them to young musical celebrities today, with their desperate exhibitionism, their inflated sense of their own importance, their demons and their recklessness.  The Beatles, partly by long experience as club musicians, partly by temperament, were already canny professionals in 1964 — brilliant musical craftsmen who took their work seriously and the brouhaha around them with a grain of salt.

In a sense, their cultural impact and almost unbelievable commercial success were what changed the business of pop music into the spangled corporate cluster-fuck it is today, but it’s hard to blame The Beatles as people for this.  Through all their success they stayed relatively sane — or as sane as any twenty-somethings who suddenly found themselves sitting on top of the world could reasonably be expected to be.

Their wit and professionalism come through in A Hard Day’s Night — as does their core innocence, which mirrors the relative innocence of the culture they took by storm.  As a pop artifact, the film is both moving and instructive.

And then there are the songs, which sound as fresh today as they ever have — not so much a reflection of the individual personalities of the young men who made the music as of their dedication to their craft, their irrepressible joy in their craft.

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Click on the image to enlarge.