A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
TCM, 12:00 a.m. ET
Richard Lester directed this 1964 movie musical, one of the best of its genre, and certainly a film that fed as well as dramatized and captured the phenomenon of Beatlemania. (Someone ought to write a book about the impact of the visual artistry of The Beatles – and I’m working on it.) The music, even 55 years later (yes, you read that right), is fresh and fantastic: the title song, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I Should Have Known Better,” “This Boy,” “And I Love Her,” “Tell Me Why,” and so on. Wow. And this is the movie in which George Harrison met Pattie Boyd, a 20-year-old British model cast as a Beatle-loving schoolgirl. Two years later, they were married. A handful of years after that, Harrison’s best friend, Eric Clapton, fell deeply in love with her, and wrote about his then-unrequited love in the classic song “Layla.” And shortly after that, Pattie left Harrison – for Clapton. That’s quite a love song…