HELP!
Director: Richard Lester
John, Paul, George and Ringo are joined by popular British character actor Leo McKern as High Priest Clang, Eleanor Bron as Priestess Ahme and Victor Spinetti, retained from A Hard Day's Night. Other supporting actors include Roy Kinnear, Warren Mitchell, Peter Copley and Dandy Nichols.
This second Beatle feature takes the zaniness of the first to cartoonish extremes. Off the wall fantasy replaces the documentary style of A Hard Day's Night in this story of a religious cult's efforts to recover a sacred ring that has become stuck on Ringo's finger. The drummer suffers numerous indignities, including attempted amputation of the hand and sacrifice to the goddess Kaili, before the affair is over.
Although the Fabs' charm is often buried beneath a labyrinthine plot, the music is bouyant, tuneful and expressive as ever. Seven new songs were composed for the film: John's title song "Help!", "Another Girl", "Ticket To Ride", "The Night Before", "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away", "I Need You" and "You're Gonna Lose That Girl".
Much of the $1.5 million film is occupied with a mad dash between exotic location. Paul has mentioned that the shooting locations, which included the Bahamas and the Austrian Alps, were selected more for their value as holiday spots than to fulfill requirements of the script.
The film went through a number of working titles before Lester settled on the title of one of John's new songs. Ringo's suggestion Eight Arms To Hold You actually appeared on the label of a first batch of Help! singles.
The critics were less enthralled with Help! than they had been with A Hard Day's Night. Nonetheless Help! won first prize at the 1965 International Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro. The Beatles themselves were less satisfied, particularly John, who dismissed the film as "crap". Their lack of enthusiasm may explain the difficulty faced by the group in selecting a script for their next feature.
Released: 1965 by United Artists
Length: 90 minutes
Medium: Colour