The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film

This hilarious homemade short is a key moment in British comedy.

Two years before "A Hard Day's Night," Richard Lester (then a TV director) made this movie, starring Goons Peter Sellers & Spike Milligan with the wonderful Leo McKern (who would later play the zany cult leader in "Help").

Here, in 1962, you can see the seeds of the revolutionary style Lester applied to the Beatles, and that was hugely influential in the look of 60s films and media. It's clearly an ancestor of Monty Python, for one.

The movie features an oddball group of deadpans who look like they could come from a Beckett play. For no reason, they're outside in a landscape somewhere, where, for no reason, they play a series of silent-movie gags on each other.

Improvised and loose, it's a record of a bunch of guys (who happen to be comedy geniuses) fooling around with a camera, just like the video posters of today. Only much, much funnier.

Richard Lester is credited as co-director (with Sellers), co-writer, cinematographer, editor, and composer. It's the earliest piece of his work we're likely to see. (Try to catch his other early ones... "It's Trad, Dad," a feature that's half early 60s pop music and half crazy gags, is in rotation on TCM and is wonderful... "Mouse On The Moon," the one just before "A Hard Day's Night," is also enjoyable, but not so much in Lester's typical style.)

When "A Hard Day's Night" was released on DVD a few years ago, the advance information and even the packaging said that the disk would include "The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film." In sad fact it didn't. So for now, it's unavailable commercially. (Though as we know, in the cyber universe, everything is SOMEWHERE.)