In the 60s The Beatles were on top of the world with their music, this ended up landing them the opportunity to star in several films. Help! released in 1965 (as a follow up to the very successful A Hard Day’s Night) takes the audience on a much different journey than their first film. Whereas A Hard Day’s Night is a somewhat realistic mockumentary of The Beatles daily life Help! Is a slapstick rendition of The Beatles favorite comedians, and TV shows of the time.
Directed by Richard Lester Help! Begins with Ringo acquiring a ring that he is unable to take off. This gets him and the band into trouble when a religious group needs to perform a ritual where the wearer of the ring is killed. To escape this group The Beatles travel around the globe until the group catches up with them for the final climax. Ringo is just suddenly able to take off the ring, he then puts in on the leader of the religious group who is then taken away to be killed.
The ending is sort of dark for such a lighthearted film that seems to not even take itself seriously, but if the director didn’t care I guess I shouldn’t either. The movie constantly interrupts itself with montages of The Beatles skiing, playing on the beach and performing songs from their album Help!. This comes off as very weird considering the band is literally being chased by a group of people trying to murder them, but the movie is a comedy so maybe that’s the director's excuse for not thinking these scenes though. The musical performances are understandable and acceptable because The Beatles were musicians, not actors (and their performances really reflect that). Ringo and John are given the most lines because the plot revolves mainly around Ringo, and John was kinda just the main man of the band. George get’s about 10 lines so it’s not fair to judge his 3 minutes of solo screen time. Paul tries his best and is given a fair amount of screen time but again he’s a musician, not an actor.
According to Paul, The Beatles got a say in what comedians they wanted to base the movie’s style after. (Their inspirations being the Marx Brothers but mainly The Goon Show). However, John stated Lester didn’t even tell them what the movie was about, years later he reflected on this and added
“ Partly, maybe, because we hadn't spent a lot of time together between A Hard Day's Night and Help!, and partly because we were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us, it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time. In our own world. It's like doing nothing most of the time, but still having to rise at 7 am, so we became bored” (Lennon).
This could also explain the lackluster acting performances from the band.
Overall I would rate this movie good-bad, as a fan of The Beatles is fun to watch them perform and just ruin takes by fooling around with each other and not caring. It’s even funnier that no one cared enough to tell them off, (or maybe that people were scared to even try that) and just decided to put in in the movie anyway. However, maybe movies from the 60s were just different in treating their audience with respect because this movie seems to think its audience is stupid. In many scenes, a character would explicitly say where they were and text would show up on the screen to remind the audience where we were. In one scene Ringo in locked in a wine cellar and a tiger enters, obviously, this scene is a bit tense because our protagonist is in danger. But the movie ruins the feeling behind this scene by putting text on the screen to literally tell us its a tiger. But audiences at the time seemed to love it so maybe they were stupid. I would not recommend this movie to people who are not fans of The Beatles because they would probably find it boring. However, if you are a Beatles fan other movies related to this are A Hard Day’s Night, Yellow Submarine and The Rutles.
Here’s a scene the shows their bad acting and the useless captions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKYpuXr_E5s
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