the rhapsodic cineaste

“Without the ring, there is no sacrifice, with out the sacrifice there is no congregation, without the congregation there'll be no…more…me.” – Clang (Leo McKern)

Help! is wildly self-indulgent. There are a few reasons for this. To hear Paul McCartney tell it, “…things went a little bit awry, I think, because what happened then was we started saying, ‘well we’ve never been to the Bahamas, can you write that in?’…‘I’ve never been skiing, I wonder if you could write a scene in with skiing?’” John Lennon was even more direct in his assessment, explaining, “we were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us; it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time.”

All things considered, it’s surprising that the film remains remotely coherent. Diverging from the far simpler A Hard Day’s Night, there is an outlandish plot here. Ringo has come into possession of a sacred ring, required for ritual sacrifice, and the cult who previously owned the ring wants it back.

To be clear, Help! is entertaining. As with A Hard Day’s Night there is quite a bit of amusing banter between the bandmates. Some of the humor is reminiscent of Monty Python’s sketch comedy, a very good thing to my mind.

For better or worse, the movie was also fairly inspirational. John Lennon suggested it was a precursor for the Batman TV series. Personally, it’s hard not to see how much the film influenced the fabrication of the Monkees.

Unlike A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles play highly caricatural versions of themselves here. While the earlier film felt biographical, here the Beatles all live together in a series of connected rowhouses. The exaggeration is amusing in its own way, though it reduces the movie to a cartoon.

Ultimately, Help! is an excuse to watch the Beatles wander around, stoned out of their minds, with a few rudimentary music videos thrown in for good measure. How much you’ll enjoy that is directly related to your affection for the Beatles themselves.