"Even more famous is the breakout scene set to 'Can't Buy Me Love,' when the four mop-tops flee from the TV studio where they're scheduled to perform and cavort in an empty athletic field that's obviously not in the same place. Lester shot them coming down a staircase from below, jumping off a construction ladder (in forward motion and in reverse), switched from normal speed to fast motion and back again, and included a 26-second helicopter shot. (It's the same helicopter the Beatles use to flee their fans in the final scene; at this budget level, if you hired one of those things for a day, you were damn well gonna use it.) Although it's sometimes claimed that this scene is edited to the beat of the song, the opposite is true: The cuts bear no relationship to the song’s rhythms and the images make no attempt to illustrate the lyric, a crucial lesson that MTV videomakers took years to catch up with."
Andrew O'Hehir in Salon watches the fiftieth-anniversary rerelease of A Hard Day's Night.
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