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To suggest that Richard Lester is an anonymous figure in film history would be far from correct -- his signature manic style still has his name attached (producers of the recent "Shooting Fish" described their movie as "son of Richard Lester"). Film buffs pay tribute to his work -- Lester won the Palm d'Or at Cannes for a movie that lacked a single Beatle, and he was the subject of a 1990 tribute at the Sundance Festival. But it is one Lester film in particular that has grown in stature as the decades have passed, and many who watched "A Hard Day's Night," upon its release in 1964 or in the years since came away with the innocent conviction that the movie sprang whole from the irrepressible personalities of its four Liverpool stars. Some had other opinions. "Let's face it," said George Harrison, "we just mutter a few words now and then and Dick Lester tells us how to do it."

Richard Lester was a precocious child who could spell 250 words by the age of 2 and entered the University of Pennsylvania at 15. There he began to see films, many of them British productions from Ealing Studios, at a nearby theater. His first show-biz gigs were musical -- playing piano in a bar and singing backup for Ginny Stevens on local CBS station WCAU. After he graduated in 1951, Lester joined WCAU as a stagehand and worked his way up to director in the days of live TV. Two years later he left for Europe, earning money as a roving correspondent. Eventually, he landed in London. Commercial television was just starting up in the United Kingdom, and Lester's CBS experience got him steady work at ARTV (where he shared an office with Deirdre Smith, his future wife). A disastrous little variety program called "The Dick Lester Show" managed to catch at least one viewer's attention -- Lester received a phone call the next day. "I watched your program last night," Peter Sellers told him, "and it was either one of the worst shows I've ever seen, or you are on to something."

Over lunch, Sellers explained that he was contemplating a TV version of the classic BBC radio program "The Goon Show," which featured Sellers and Spike Milligan, among others. The eventual result, "Idiot Weekly," was first aired in 1956 with Lester directing, and was an immediate hit. Other series with the same team followed -- "A Show Called Fred," "Son of Fred" -- shows that are not only beloved in their own right but often cited as blueprints for the Monty Python routines to come. In 1959 Lester directed Sellers and Milligan in an 11-minute short called "The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film," which earned much acclaim and an Academy Award nomination.

Lester's first movie was a 1962 cheapie about the resurgent traditional jazz movement, "It's Trad, Dad" (released in the United States as "Ring-a-Ding Rhythm"). With the trad-jazz boomlet fading even as the movie was nearing completion, Lester improvised by hiring Chubby Checker to do a twist number near the end. Next came "Mouse on the Moon," a sequel to the Sellers hit "The Mouse That Roared" (minus Sellers). While these epics may not have secured Lester's place in the film pantheon, they would prove significant in unforeseen ways. It was through "Mouse on the Moon" that Lester met producer Walter Shenson. And it was one of the musicians featured in "It's Trad, Dad" who played Lester some records he'd bought after hearing a group in Liverpool's Cavern Club.

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