Vintage Vault: Help!
By Jeff Vandusen
Lance Writer
February 13, 2008
 The story goes that The Beatles were high when they filmed Help! in 1965. Bob Dylan had introduced the group to pot in 1964 at a Manhattan hotel and whatever rock lore, mythology or legend may dictate, The Beatles had used it heavily as a tool for escape and as fuel for creativity ever since. Such was the case with Help!—the four shot the movie under a cloud of marijuana. Ringo even waxes with a smile on Anthology about a time where he and Paul would run off from filming scenes in Austria to spark a joint before returning to the set all red-eyed and giggly. This explains why The Beatles would sometimes flub their lines or run off and play whenever given the opportunity. The shoot was something of an unplanned mess, spanning the Western and Eastern hemispheres from cloudy olde England to the snowy Austrian Alps to the sunny Bahamas. The lads didn’t really enjoy any of it.
Help! revolves around the band cutting an album. Ringo acquires a bizarre sacrificial ring (roughly the size of a Ring Pop candy) from a cult and winds up getting hunted down across the globe by a group of backward-talking cult members and two incompetent scientists. Scotland Yard are on The Beatles’ side—and so is the Queen. However, the movie isn’t really about The Beatles: they’re just in it.
Coming off of the grand success of A Hard Day’s Night, released a year earlier, The Beatles were contractually obligated to United Artists to make two more movies. Help! was drafted under the greatly-creative title of Beatles Two and was to be shot in glorious colour. They had more money for Help! because A Hard Day’s Night proved that The Beatles were bankable for being different in movies, unlike Elvis Presley under the management of Colonel Tom Parker being forced to appear in one awful movie after the next as a caricature. The title Help! came from John’s song. He wrote it in a period of quiet suffering (his “fat Elvis period,” as he called it). If you pay attention to the lyrics, it doesn’t really come off as a glitzy pop song—it’s actually a little depressing. The soundtrack is really the only thing that makes the movie watchable.
The pot wasn’t the only reason Help! was such a messy movie. Director Richard Lester, an American expatriate to England, just made the film up as he went along; developing the script from pitches The Beatles made about places they’d never been before. It was more like a vacation than a movie shoot and there were moments where Lester could have done more to show the group’s mad-cap sense of humour. The Beatles ended up saying that they felt like “extras in their own movie.” In the unplanned randomness, though, there are sparks of actual comic brilliance—mostly held by the supporting cast. Help! could be seen, however, as some sort of a precursor to the satirical insanity of Monty Python or the Technicolor and unplanned wonderment of The Monkees.
In movies, The Beatles elicited comparisons to The Marx Brothers, probably because there were four of them and they were funny. It’s really shallow critical tripe to say that because The Beatles and The Marx Brothers were in completely different leagues, each bringing something a little different to the screen. There’s a story where Groucho Marx once called Richard Lester in 1964 because he was angry after he saw A Hard Day’s Night.
“At least you could tell us apart!” Groucho spat.
Lester wears that phone call from Groucho Marx as a badge of honour.
|
