Seen today, [Lester's] little jeu d'esprit [The Running, Jumping, and Standing-Still Film] is reminiscent of nothing so much as Georges Méliès, Mack Sennett, and early American comedy; and it foreshadows in Lester's work that important strain of Goon Show humor which he will later apply to topics of Universal Significance. (p. 26)

[A Hard Day's Night] is a critical essay on the subject of Beatlemania and media manipulation and, at the same time, the most successful hype in the history of the Beatle myth. This is characteristic, really, of nearly all Lester's films: that they analyze what they are doing at the same time that they do it. And, as always, the form that Lester chooses is equally important here: a quasidocumentary about the group and about the people in it, and about the fierce pressures of media adulation: the crowding, the hysteria, the hotel-room claustrophobia, the...