By 1965, the Beatles were at a turning point. The days of innocent pop songs like "Please Please Me" and "Love Me Do" were ending, and the orchestral grandeur of "All You Need Is Love" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" had yet to begin. The Fab Four were only just beginning to expand their horizons philosophically and musically, and the results were clear. Their songs began to feature touches that their younger selves would have never thought of, from the dark, blues-infused progressions of "Baby's In Black" to the feedback wail that kicks off "I Feel Fine". A change had begun in the band, and it couldn't be stopped.
As the band's music underwent a metamorphosis, it only seemed natural that their movies should follow suit. When Help! was released on July 29, 1965, it proved to be a far different beast than A Hard Day's Night. Audiences who went in expecting the semi-realistic charm of the first film were instead treated to 90 minutes of Marx Brothers-style insanity. Help! was met with mixed reception that still continues to this day, and the Beatles themselves expressed disappointment about the film upon its release. But is the film truly as dire as many claim it is?
Help! originated in late 1964, when United Artists re-hired A Hard Day's Night helmer Richard Lester to make a follow-up to the film. Given A Hard Day's Night's success, the circumstances of the film's creation were far different - Lester was given a significantly larger budget than with the first Beatles film, meaning that the film could be shot in color and in foreign locales. When Lester and the Beatles consulted, it soon became clear that neither party wanted to make the colorized version of their first film that the studio hoped for. Instead, they chose to create a spoof movie, drawing their inspiration from another one of United Artists's lucrative properties - James Bond.
Help! was far from the first movie to capitalize on the popularity of Agent 007 and his ilk. During the 50s and 60s, the paranoid tensions of the Cold War caused a spike in interest in practically everything spy-related. From big-budget efforts like Goldfinger and From Russia With Love to cheap foreign exploitation films, everyone seemed to be cashing in on the secret agent craze. This frenzy, however, wasn't limited to completely serious films. For every spy movie of the 60s, there seemed to be a spoof - every Dr. No had its Our Man Flint. This was what Help! was up against - a backwash of mediocre comedies. If it wanted to succeed, it had to be different.
Help! separated itself from any competition through a semi-unique comedic style based largely on that of Lester's previous engagement, The Goon Show. Created by Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and the legendary Peter Sellers, The Goon Show was a far cry from the gentle, straightforward sitcom humor many people were used to in the 50s and 60s. Its style was irreverent, surreal, and played fast and loose with reality. In a typical Goon Show episode, gibberish words were accepted as part of the English language, punchlines were told before the actual jokes, and chaos reigned above all. The show proved to be massively influential, inspiring and paving the way for future comedic acts such as Eddie Izzard and Monty Python's Flying Circus.
If anything, Help!'s actual production shared one main quality with The Goon Show: a complete lack of control. Richard Lester communicated less with the Beatles than he did on A Hard Day's Night, which left the band members extremely confused. This lack of communication led to a point where John Lennon complained to Lester that he felt like an extra in his own movie. To make matters worse, the Beatles were unfamiliar with the script and often distracted by other matters on set. As a result, flubbed lines and failed takes were common, and on occasion the Beatles couldn't even get through their first lines without bursting into laughter. Despite the production being constantly on the brink of disaster, the cast and crew made it through alive, and Help! was released in late July of 1965.
Help!'s opening clearly establishes the differences between itself and A Hard Day's Night. Besides the obvious shift from black and white to color, the entirety of the opening feels more stereotypically cinematic - lighting is more atmospheric, select colors are accented more than others, and angles are more varied and dramatic. It also sets up an element that A Hard Day's Night lacked: a clear plot. In the Indian-set opening, the Thuggee cult (later immortalized as the heart-removing antagonists of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) prepare to sacrifice a new victim to Kali, the god of chaos. However, one aspect of the ritual is off - the victim isn't wearing the sacrificial ring. With a smash cut to said ring adorning Ringo Starr's finger, the story is underway.
The scene that follows stands as a good example of the film's absurdist comedic style. As the Beatles return home to their apartments (all apparently next to each other), two neighbors talk about how "natural" they seem and how they haven't let fame go to their heads. We then see the inside of the Beatles's apartments - or should I say apartment? As it turns out, the four seemingly separate houses are all one large room on the inside, with each Beatle's living quarters neatly indicated through differently colored walls and floors. Even stranger are the smaller touches added to each of the Beatles's quarters. John Lennon has a massive bookshelf with secret compartments containing more books, which are hollowed out to house even more books. Paul McCartney's has a retractable organ, on which Superman comics seem to serve as sheet music. George Harrison's floor is furnished with grass, which a gardener cuts using windup chattering teeth. Ringo's walls seem to be composed of nothing but vending machines. The surrealism doesn't stop there - despite the lack of walls, the Beatles still call each other on their own separate telephones.
This bizarre apartment gambit serves as a perfect example of why Help!'s style of humor works so well - it's visually driven. Though the film is packed to the brim with witty retorts and sharp one-liners, the majority of punchlines come from framing and editing. Take, for example, the fact that the cultists follow the Beatles around in a department store delivery van. The joke's punchline, where the cultists have to pay themselves before they leave, is delivered and accented through the cinematography. When the cultists try to start up the van, the current medium shot continues without cutting. This directly undercuts the audience's expectations, as the audience typically expects a cut to show the car starting. When the cultists finally pay the van's built-in meter, the shot cuts, and things are restored to as close to normal as possible. Though this technique seems commonplace in modern-day cinema (Edgar Wright tends to use it quite a bit), its appearance in Help! represents the emergence of a newer, more visual style of comedy.
Another emerging comedic technique that Help! exemplifies is meta-humor, a style of comedy based on an awareness of the medium, genre, and in extreme cases the audience. Though meta-humor had been seen before, most obviously in the films of the Marx Brothers and Looney Tunes shorts, it was typically limited to characters talking to the audience. Help!, however, took the concept and ran wild with it. Title cards are used to point out the painfully obvious (such as that the black-and-yellow giant cat growling at Ringo is, in fact, "A TIGER") as well as provide convenient scene transitions (when a character mentions "a very famous plan" at the end of one scene, the next scene opens with the title card "THE VERY FAMOUS PLAN"). Boxes of dynamite are conveniently labeled with "EQUAL TO EXACTLY ONE MILLIONTH OF ALL THE HIGH EXPLOSIVE EXPLODED IN ONE WEEK OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR". In a riff on the ridiculous length of 60s blockbusters, the film features a randomly placed intermission (albeit a ten-second long one that consists of the Beatles running around in a forest). Characters constantly crack jokes about the contrivances of the plot: when told that the escaped tiger seeking to chow down on Ringo can only be calmed down when someone sings "Ode To Joy", John Lennon exclaims, "Of course! Why didn't you think of that, you twit?" Finally, as expected, the fourth wall is broken almost constantly as characters turn to the audience to comment on their predicaments. These techniques soon became popular in other comedies and helped redefine what it meant to be a spoof film, paving the way for later parodies such as Scream, Spaceballs, and Airplane!
Of course, what would a Beatles movie be without the music? The musical sequences in Help! are where the majority of the film's few similarities to A Hard Day's Night appear. Richard Lester largely retained the early music-video aesthetics he used on the previous Beatles film, keeping the rhythmic cutting and limited story relevance intact. However, the enhanced budget for Help! allows Lester to add upon his already finely-tuned style and generally improve the sequences. Perhaps the best example of this is the Beatles's performance of "You're Going To Lose That Girl" in the film. The scene heavily utilizes chiaroscuro techniques by lighting the Beatles largely from behind, haloing them in bright light while obscuring their faces in shadow. Cool blue and purple color accents and heavy smoke combine with the lighting to give the scene an atmospheric, noir-esque feel befitting the song's themes of loss and bitterness. Considering how different Help! and A Hard Day's Night are, the musical sequences in Help! feel like a break from the story; a chance for exhausted audience members to relax in between sequences of absolute chaos.
The aforementioned scenes of chaos continue to accelerate as the film continues and the cult's plans become more ridiculous. This gives the film's absurdist humor more room to play, and situations become sillier as a result. An open-air recording session turns into a full-fledged war, complete with tanks and rocket launchers. A bomb shatters the ice on a frozen lake, revealing a hopelessly lost swimmer trying to find his way to the White Cliffs of Dover. An airport worker carries on a game of ping-pong while directing planes at the same time. When the final scene rolls around, the film has essentially degraded into a screwball chase scene with the Beatles goofing around in the middle of it. In a fittingly surreal final touch, the film ends with a dedication to Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine. No reason is given, and no reason is needed.
Upon its release, Help! was met with mixed reactions. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, who had previously praised A Hard Day's Night, panned Help!, calling it "dull", "awfully redundant", and "without sense or pattern". Though it was still generally successful and made back more than 10 times its budget at the box office, critics generally felt that the film was inferior to A Hard Day's Night. In the years after its release, opinions have shifted more to the positive. Even John Lennon, who didn't originally like the film, ultimately admitted that, upon reflection, the film was more influential than he ever gave it credit for. Help! can also be attributed with aiding the Beatles's shift into more experimental territory - George Harrison reportedly became interested in Indian compositional techniques and religious concepts during filming, and began to work them into his music and lifestyle.
Though its style may be too chaotic for some audiences, Help! still stands as an important turning point in the history of both cinema and the Beatles. Its exuberant silliness helped set a new direction for comedic filmmaking, and it portrays the band at a time when they were just testing the waters of psychedelia and richer musical stylings. It may not be a perfect film, but it's an important film whose reputation still holds up today. Unfortunately, the Beatles's follow-up film wouldn't be quite as successful.
Next time: the Beatles set off on Tour.
Sources:
The Beatles anthology (2000). San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books.
Ess, R. (2014, June 27). Exploring the lunacy of "the goon show". Retrieved from http://splitsider.com/2014/06/exploring-the-lunacy-of-the-goon-show/.
Crowther, B. (1965, August 24). Help. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B0CEEDC103CE733A25757C2A96E9C946491D6CF&partner=Rotten%2520Tomatoes.
Shenson, W. (Producer), & Lester, R. (Director). Help! [Motion picture]. United States: Subafilms Ltd.
Help. FilmGrab. Retrieved from http://film-grab.com/2014/05/26/help/.
No comments:
Post a Comment