In his book British Film Music and Film Musicals, K. I. Donnelly devotes an entire chapter to A Hard Day's Night and what he calls "the Musical Revolution."  This chapter outlines the previous style of rock and roll films and film musicals (which are described here as theaterical or "age-old narratives") and the stark contrast of this 1964 comedy that changed the future of the genre.  Donnelly describes A Hard Day's Night as being "a significant point for the development of the relationship between music and cinema" because rather than focusing on the narrative, this film focuses on the young and spontaneous lives of The Beatles and uses their pop music as part of the narrative instead of mere background.  Donnelly also notes that the music in this film is often times performed rather than lip-synched, which was a technique often used in the previous Cliff Richard and Elvis films.  With a bold statement, Donnelly claims "the success of the film put pop music firmly on the agenda of the cinema."

    Ultimately, this chapter is significant evidence in support of my thesis.  It not only outlines the characteristics of  A Hard Day's Night but it also outlines what was unique about this film.  In order to claim that A Hard Day's Night was the first successful film to unite the pop cultures of both film and music, and therefore the first true rock and roll film, I would need to say why its predecessors were unsuccessful in this endeavor, and this is explicitly outlined in this chapter.  The "precursors to A Hard Day's Night were content at first to attempt to dilute pop music by mixing it into traditional forms of musical entertainment.  Pop stars such as Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard made successful films that took the traditional musical film form and attempted to imbue it with teenage orientation [...] A Hard Day's Night broke dramatically with the previous uses of pop music in cinema in a number of significant ways."  A Hard Day's Night was different from its precursors according to Donnelly because it did not have any "previously established musical forms," and because it was the first film to use a "film style that paralleled pop music with dynamic visual activity, and the articulation of songs as non-diagetic music."  By emphasizing the music's narrative role in this film, Donnelly explains that for the first time in film, a musical seemed to be about the music and the musicians to the point where the plot was very haphazard and ultimately inconsequential.  The medium of film adopted the medium of music as its subject in a way that had never been done before.