The Films of the Beatles, Part Two: "Help!"

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/.

The Films of the Beatles, Part One: "A Hard Day's Night"

On June 6, 1964, Beatlemania reached a new peak in America with the nationwide release of A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles film meant to accompany the album of the same name. United Artists, who produced the film, didn't expect it to make any major waves - after all, it was just a cheaply made and quickly shot vehicle to exploit the raving throngs of Beatle nuts. Yet on the morning of its release, there was New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther claiming that the film was "much more sophisticated in theme and technique than its seemingly frivolous matter promises". A Hard Day's Night proved to be more than just profitable - it proved to be revolutionary, as many critics claim that it essentially created the "rock film" as we know it today.

In honor of this momentous occasion, I've decided to open my newly-created film blog with retrospective analyses of not only A Hard Day's Night, but all of the other Beatles movies as well. Though I didn't live during the times when these films were released, I can't deny that they impacted and shaped my understanding of film and music. I hope not only to discover these films's place in the history of the Beatles, but their place in cinema overall.



Let's start at the very beginning - a very good place to start, as Maria von Trapp once stated. It seems redundant to recap the history of perhaps the most well-known band in music history, but it must be stated nonetheless. Liverpool, England natives John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Stuart Sutcliffe began to perform as the Beatles in the early 1960s after they rejected their original name of the Quarrymen. After Sutcliffe left the group, the remaining members were discovered by manager Brian Epstein and signed to EMI Records. Under the advice of producer George Martin, they fired their original drummer and hired local musician Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr. After achieving success in their home country with songs such as "Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me", the Beatles finally broke through in 1964 with "I Want To Hold Your Hand". The single rocketed to the top of the international charts, causing a sensation across the globe. However, it was the Beatles's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that cemented their fame. The estimated viewing audience of seventy-three million people showed that Beatlemania was finally in full swing.

It was about this time that A Hard Day's Night began to take shape. Curiously enough, the film was never meant to make any money - in fact, it was meant to flop. The genesis for the film came when EMI encountered resistance from American music labels to release the Beatles's music in the USA. Enter United Artists, a major media conglomerate involved in both film and music. Convinced that the Beatles could be incredibly successful in America, the company formed a deal with Brian Epstein based around an idea plucked straight from The Producers. United Artists planned for the movie, tentatively titled Beatlemania, to be an extremely low-budget exploitation picture and fully expected it to lose money. This move would give them the releasing rights to their true goal: the film's soundtrack. Epstein agreed to the deal, and the production was set in motion under the guidance of American producer Walter Shenson. Despite UA's clear intentions, one factor would prove to change the movie's path permanently - the Beatles themselves.



Though the Beatles were fine with the film's low budget, they refused to participate in any low-quality production. After looking into several different directors and scripts, the group finally decided to hire American filmmaker Richard Lester as their director. Lester's experience came primarily from TV, where he had worked for thirteen years. During his period in television, he met legendary comedian Peter Sellers, who ultimately starred in Lester's short film The Running Jumping & Standing Still Show. The short proved to be popular amongst the Beatles, in particular with John Lennon, and led to Lester being hired as the director. For the film's script, Lester and the Beatles sought out a writer who could capture the Liverpudlian dialect the band had become known for, ultimately settling on Welsh playwright Alun Owen. In order to write the screenplay, Owen spent a good amount of time with the Beatles on their British tour so as to capture the chaos that the band members suffered through daily.

The screenplay that emerged, while approved by the studios, had practically nothing in common with the style of "rock films" popularized by Elvis Presley and the like. Instead of following a traditional three-act structure, the story realistically portrayed an average 24 hours in the lives of the Beatles. There was little to no overarching conflict, and the musical numbers seemed more randomly placed than realistically choreographed. In the basest of terms, A Hard Day's Night was stylistically a new-wave film, and not dissimilar to works such as Breathless and The 400 Blows. The film's neorealist aesthetic was amplified by its production, as it was shot in black-and-white with a total budget of $500,000. A Hard Day's Night was shot in seven weeks, edited in three months, and released on June 6, 1964.



A Hard Day's Night's opening sequence, set to the eponymous smash hit, quickly and efficiently establishes the film's amiably chaotic tone as our mop-topped heroes find themselves on the run from screaming throngs of fans. From the very first second of the film, a mixture of jarringly quick cuts, shaky camera movements, and disorienting extreme closeups plunge the audience into a state of screwball hysteria. Though this style certainly isn't one-of-a-kind - as stated before, it cribs heavily from artists like Truffaut and Godard - the music underneath it makes it stand out. The song sets the pace for the scene: edits and movements correspond to beats and chord shifts, making the music and visuals essentially inseparable. Simply put, the scene is more than a musical number - it's a music video, and quite possibly the first of its kind.

Perhaps the former name of Beatlemania suits the film's theme better - at its heart, A Hard Day's Night is a film about the Beatles coping with their new-found fame. At the time of AHDN's release, the Beatles's popularity had just broken through to America, and it shows. The Beatles themselves seem like they don't know how to feel about their success. True, they're fleeing from their rabid fans in the opening and throughout the film, but they're doing it with massive grins on their faces. This good will stands as a representation of the Beatles at their most innocent, long before the combination of ambition and experimentalism that would drive them away from pop success and towards musical mastery.



At the same time, A Hard Day's Night takes a rather critical view of fame. There's an almost constant sense of entrapment that comes with the Beatles's success, as they find themselves encumbered with limitations at every turn. They're coerced into inane, crowded press conferences, which they treat with liberal snark. The director of their TV special refuses to allow them any room to improvise on stage, fearing that doing so will damage his reputation. Even their manager (played by British character actor Norman Rossington) refuses to let them leave their hotel room, forcing them to reply to ridiculous amounts of fan mail instead. To reinforce this theme, Lester manipulates the frame to be purposely restrictive. This is made clear in the press conference scene, which is shot in a series of tight close-ups. The scene's chaotic sound design, largely reliant on oppressive background chatter, combines with the visuals to create a claustrophobic atmosphere, which helps the audience identify with the Beatles's disdain for the conference.

Another key example of these restrictions comes early in the film, when the Beatles are on a train to the site of their TV special. John and Ringo notice two female passengers, and try to get them to sit with them in the dining car. Unfortunately, their chances are destroyed when Paul's grandfather (who has been traveling with the Beatles for the entire movie) claims the two are escaped prisoners under his custody. Events spiral out of control from there until Paul's grandfather ends up locked in the luggage car so he can't cause any more trouble. The Beatles, however, feel sorry for him and choose to join him in the car, ultimately breaking out into "I Should Have Know Better". Director of photography Gilbert Taylor chooses to film this scene with the band members framed behind and inside bars, whether they be the wire mesh on the train car's doors or the spokes of a bicycle wheel. This motif of the Beatles being "prisoners" is repeated throughout AHDN, most obviously near the end of the film when Ringo is arrested for loitering and sprung from a police station by the other Beatles.



Another moment of imprisonment seems to come when the TV director orders our protagonists to be locked up in their dressing room after they ridicule him. As their manager escorts them to the room, the Beatles take a different turn and slip out the fire escape. "We're free!" Paul McCartney cries, and the opening chords of "Can't Buy Me Love" kick in as if to bolster his statement. What follows is one of A Hard Day's Night's few moments of release, as the Beatles run, jump, and generally goof around on an empty field while the song plays. Lester and Taylor create a noticeable distinction between this scene and the previous ones by relying more on wide shots, in particular an extreme wide shot filmed from a helicopter. The scene also has a more slapstick nature than anything before, using Benny Hill-esque speed ramping and odd angles to create a carefree atmosphere. Even the Beatles themselves act differently - they seem looser and happier than we've seen them previously in the film. It feels different than anything we've seen before, cutting through the layers of restriction to show the Beatles as they really were at the time.

Later in the film, Paul's grandfather convinces Ringo to make an escape of his own by playing up how the other Beatles constantly make fun of him. Ringo decides to leave the TV studio and go "parading before it's too late". This scene, while representing another moment of freedom for the characters, is tonally different from the previous scene. Whereas the "Can't Buy Me Love" scene is energetic and goofy, Ringo's journey is more reflective and calming. Taylor's shots tend to run longer and are more stabilized, and the sharp cuts of previous scenes are replaced by dissolves. Even the background music of "Ringo's Theme" is a relaxed contrast to the manic excitement of "Can't Buy Me Love". Both scenes of escapism stand as a hopeful sign that the shackles of fame can be shrugged off, at least for a little while.



Unfortunately, these moments of freedom don't last forever. Sooner or later, someone always catches up to the Beatles and forces them back into their restrictions. For example, Ringo's solo jaunt ends with him being arrested and held in a police station. The rest of the Beatles rush back to free him and get to their concert as "Can't Buy Me Love" plays in the background, directly tying the scene to the previous escape attempt. The only major difference between the scene is our heroes' destination. In the first "Can't Buy Me Love" scene, the Beatles are trying to flee from the theater - in the second, they're trying to flee to the theater. It's a carefully thought-out touch that emphasizes how the Beatles's management isn't the only restriction caused by their fame.

The final scene of A Hard Day's Night brings the film to a close both in narrative and theme. After they finish their concert, the Beatles rush to a helicopter to get to the site of their next concert. The title song plays for the first time since the opening as the helicopter lifts off, leaving a trail of autographed Beatles pictures in its wake. It's a well-chosen bookend to the film - as well as the eponymous track, both scenes feature the Beatles on the run to get to their next concert. Lester's choices with this ending give the film a notably elliptical nature, suggesting that the restrictions of fame will always surround the Beatles despite any brief moments of freedom. Oddly enough, this conclusion doesn't seem angry or nihilistic - the Beatles themselves seem to have an idea of how to work around these restrictions, and that's just fine with them.



As one might predict, A Hard Day's Night was a hit across the world. Upon its premiere, it destroyed box office records to gross over 11 million dollars worldwide. The soundtrack was perhaps even more successful, rocketing up to the top of the Billboard charts and sticking there. Critics of both music and film doled out adulations for A Hard Day's Night, with the Village Voice hyperbolically terming the film "the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals". The film also served to kick off a long and storied career for director Richard Lester, who would go on to direct the Palme d'Or-winning The Knack... and How to Get It and the Hollywood superhero blockbuster Superman II.

A Hard Day's Night holds a well-respected reputation even to this day. The recent Criterion Collection re-mastering and limited theatrical release of the film proves that, despite its age, it still matters not just as a piece of musical history but as a great film as well. The Beatles seemed to capture lighting in a bottle with A Hard Day's Night. One question, however, remained - could they do it again?

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Next time: the Beatles get a little Help! from their friends.

Sources:

The Beatles anthology (2000). San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books.

Rybaczewski, D. (n.d.). "A hard day's night" soundtrack album. Retrieved from http://www.beatlesebooks.com/hard-days-night-soundtrack.

Crowther, B. (1964, August 12). A hard day's night. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=990DE7DE1E30E033A25751C1A96E9C946591D6CF&partner=Rotten%2520Tomatoes.

Shenson, W. (Producer), & Lester, R. (Director). (1964). A hard day's night [Motion picture]. United States: Janus Films.

A hard day's night. FilmGrab. Retrieved from http://film-grab.com/2014/05/26/a-hard-days-night/.