If you are a young man, who has suddenly found himself to be incredibly well-known, popular, and pretty wealthy, and you have no idea how long that gravy train is going to last – or what mis-step could cause you and your group to be tossed overboard, in favor of the next big thing – even if that line bothers you, you might well have to ask yourself, “do I rock the boat over this?”
I suspect there isn’t a satisfactory answer. It wouldn’t surprise me if Paul McCartney had been asked about it at one point in the past, but honestly I wouldn’t take this word as gospel either–he’s been known to revise history here or there (or everywhere) as well. Most likely we’ll never know. It’s just odd.
You don’t really suppose if either (or both) had said, “Um, give me a moment here, Dick and Alun. You probably don’t know it but my mum’s actually dead, only a few years ago, so I’m wondering if you’d mind very much changing this one line a little bit. I just feel a bit funny talking about her like she’s still alive. Do you mind much?”, they would have had their careers ruined or even disrupted in any way?
Yes — someone wrote that George Harrison suspected he could get away with the “tie” remark to George Martin after their EMI audition, because he knew Martin had produced Spike Mulligan LPs.
(Still, it’s fun to imagine how much of world history hung in the balance, as they awaited Martin’s reaction…)
I have no idea if it would have actually disrupted things; what I’m saying is that John or Paul may have been concerned that “stepping out of line” in that way could have.
Also, FWIW, though both men were, as you note, close to their mothers, and affected by their early deaths, they were also from a generation in which men (British men, in particular, I suspect) were expected to be circumspect with their emotions, and not let something like that be shown to bother them. “Stiff upper lip” and all that.
Remember, the movie was made to cash in and to sell the soundtrack album. United Artists thought the group might be forgotten by the time it was released and were reluctant to bankroll it until someone pointed out how lucrative the soundtrack would be.
Because of that, it was shot as quickly as possible and the Beatles stuck to the script (though there was a lot of ad libbing).
Remember, too, that you didn’t talk about personal issues back then. John and Paul did not want to talk about their mothers’ deaths; a lot of personal stuff remained in the background until serious biographies were published.
I don’t know very much about customs in the medieval period.
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night—can you tell us what the line was, exactly?
I could look it up, but basically when Paul introduces his grandfather to the others, he explains that he’s his mother’s father (referring to her in the present tense, not “my late mother”) and at another point one of the managers is arguing with Lennon (throughout the movie, they’re talking back to and mocking all sorts of authority figures) and says to him “I’ll tell your mother on you.”
Thanks. I don’t find either of those lines as problematic or insensitive as you do (and "They were playing fictional versions of themselves,” as you said in your OP, is part of the reason why).
Neither remark is derogatory. They are just unnecessary.
Not too long before this, in December 1963, the Beatles appeared on The Morecambe and Wise Show, a comedy sketch show on the BBC. During that appearance, John makes a joke about how his dad used to tell him about Morecambe and Wise, and makes a gesture with his hand just below his waist, as if to indicate that he was a little boy at the time. Morecambe responds, “Oh, you’ve only got a little dad, have you?”, and the Beatles all obligingly crack up.
John’s father, of course, walked out on the family when John was very young. They certainly didn’t have the kind of relationship where his father would have fondly reminisced about comedians of the good old days, and at the time John hadn’t seen his father in almost 20 years. The whole exchange, of course, was scripted by Morecambe and Wise’s writers. But John performed the joke, it got a laugh, and there’s no indication that he complained about it or was bothered by it, even though his absent father must have been a painful topic for him.
They could easily have rewritten the bit to give that line to Paul or George, but they didn’t. It may well have bothered John, just as the lines in Hard Day’s Night might have bothered him. But it just doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to mention it to anyone, whether because he didn’t want to rock the boat, because he felt he should put the band’s image as fun-loving scamps above his personal feelings, or because he was still in the mode of deferring to Brian Epstein about how to conduct himself during TV appearances.
If the line is actually something close to those words, “my mother’s father” doesn’t necessarily imply that she’s still alive; it’s simply explaining the family relationship. Unless there’s a reason to explicitly call out the fact that his mother had passed away, there’s no real need to include “late” there.
I refer in conversation to my grandmothers from time to time, both of whom are deceased, and unless there’s a reason to make it clear to the listener that the grandmother in question is dead, I don’t say “my late grandmother,” just “my grandmother.”
Here, too, I don’t take that line as explicitly stating that John’s mother is alive; it’s a paraphrasing of what kids say to one another when playing or horsing around, and one of them gets hurt feelings. It’s a throwaway line, and maybe meant to demonstrate that the manager isn’t terribly emotionally mature, and/or that he realizes that anything else he’s tried to rein in Lennon isn’t working.
If your paraphrasing of those lines is close to what’s in the actual film, then I think you’re taking this whole thing far too seriously. IMO.
I don’t take this very seriously at all. Obviously, I’m complaining about lines that they themselves didn’t take offense to at all. I’m saying they had some reason to request a change and didn’t avail themselves of it.
Of which, Lennon in particular is portrayed as leching and flirting constantly (they all are, but him in particular) and in his case it’s completely inappropriate because, as was pointed out, he was actually married with a small child at the time. So they probably bought into “It’s all made up stuff, not really about our real selves, Paul doesn’t have an irritating grandfather, etc.” and so were willing to go along with the script as written.
As to this point, for the record, Paul’s line is (explaining why his grandfather is traveling with them), “My mother thought the trip would do him good.” So the script does make it sound like Paul’s mother was still alive. It’s a quick line of dialogue in a very rapid back-and-forth conversation, so it’s easy to miss, but it’s there.
Make a note of that word! Give it to Susan!
You are basing this entire thread on your perception that John and Paul were so incredibly sensitive about their mothers’ deaths that any mention of that should have had them up in arms about it.
Just too many assumptions on your part. All you know about the deaths and its effect on the lads is what you’ve read. Which could have been totally correct but still couldn’t give any sort of sense of how L and Mc would deal with acting out a fictional scene in a comedic film that mentions their mums.
Why would they even care beyond thinking in passing about their mothers when they read the script? In the same way you would briefly think of a Cadillac when the scene has a Caddy in it but you wouldn’t start obsessing over every aspect of Cadillac-ness in your life. It’s playacting. It’s pretend. It’s just a day’s work.
I don’t think most of us would have given it a second thought. It would have been far stranger if John and Paul had insisted the script have their mothers as deceased because in real life, they were. And then the the writers would have to figure out some plot explanation for their deaths even though the mothers didnt really figure into the plot at all.
Outright biographical pictures of the time were pretty much entirely fictional. It just wasn’t as big a deal at the time to not adhere so close to reality. I think we’ve had too many years of articles talking about the reality vs the fiction in movies based upon true stories (which I have fun reading) and a whole generation that takes it too literally.
I have to agree with this. It’s just a movie, and they’re just a couple of lines from a movie. And I’ve read that production was rushed:
…when the new title was agreed upon, it became necessary to write and quickly record a new title song, which was completed on 16 April, just eight days before filming was finished.
I think it’s safe to assume that, at the time, they didn’t feel as important as they did later and would be less inclined to raise a fuss, and it’s accepted as fact that nearly everyone thought their fame would fizzle out quickly.
Also, they might have liked the idea of being portrayed as “healthy and normal,” without any references to their tragic losses.
Yes, I believe this was the explanation: AHDN was a quickie exploitation film, made to take advantage of the Beatles’ brief heyday and to wring the most juice out of their popularity before their bubble burst as inevitably it would. The Beatles themselves were eager participants in exploiting themselves and wouldn’t do or say anything that prevented the film’s release by even a minute because it was widely felt that they were just an unusually virulent fad.
The fact that they turned out to have astonishingly long-lived endurance as a group colors our perception of the times.