Help! (1965, Richard Lester) (Patreon)

54/100

No idea why I didn't watch this way back in the '80s, when I first saw A Hard Day's Night; I was enough of a Beatles fan by then to purchase their first four U.K. albums the instant that they were released on CD (26 February 1987), and presumably Help! would have been readily accessible at my local video stores. Just never got around to it, for whatever combination of reasons. Which means that I never formed any sentimental attachment to it, which in turn means that the film's nearly nonstop casual racism proved impossible to overlook/excuse. Thankfully, the Beatles themselves don't come across as remotely hateful (and of course George's sincere love for Indian music kicked off that same year), but the whole Thuggee-sacrifice concept is rancid colonialist garbage, no less offensive here than it is in Temple of Doom (which got the exact same rating, actually, sentimental affection notwithstanding). I can't even grudgingly concede that it's funny racism, à la, say, Richard Libertini's performance in All of Me; Leo McKern in particular is a comic black hole here, seemingly convinced that he can let the costumes and viewers' prejudices do most of the work for him. Wouldn't necessarily be ruinous were it not so pervasive, but the movie's entire plot is built around cult hijinks, with something cringeworthy popping up every few minutes from start to finish. Made it very hard for me to enjoy the goofier stuff, though I was at least able to appreciate Lester's brilliant cold open, which cuts from the aborted sacrifice to the title song in what seems like a complete non sequitur ("Wow, that's amateurish," I thought)...until a dart suddenly hits Ringo in the "face."

There's another factor at work, too, both here and w/r/t Hard Day's Night (a film I like a great deal by my standards but rate lower than most would, at "only" 73). Reportedly, The Goon Show was a huge influence on Lester, and subsequently on Monty Python; there's an unmistakable proto-Python quality to Help!...but primarily the Palin/Jones axis, with its free-floating zaniness. And just as I love many McCartney and Harrison songs while being a Lennon guy at heart, I laugh at a lot of absurdist Goon-style comedy despite my much deeper love for Cleese and Chapman's exercises in deranged illogic. Which I guess is just a longwinded way of saying that both Beatles movies derive from a tradition of very British humor that doesn't happen to be my favorite. Help's single funniest joke, to my mind, is atypical of the film's overall sensibility: Scotland Yard's chief superintendent suggests that he take a call intended for Ringo, explaining "I'm a bit of a famous mimic in my own small way, you know. James Cagney...", proceeds to do an exaggerated but still reasonably solid Ringo impression ("Hello there, this is the famous Ringo here, gear fab, what is it that I can do for you as it were, gear fab?"), and inspires a sullen reply from George: "Not a bit like Cagney." I'm just more in sync with that sort of verbal misapprehension than with such random silliness as the "intermission" or "The Exciting Adventure of Paul on the Floor." (That's Ed, my second-favorite Help! gag is the jet-sized Pan Am ramp pulling up to the tiny passenger plane, which is pure visual absurdity.)

Oh, right, the songs. They're good! Still wish the Beatles had performed them live rather than lip-syncing, and Lester pretty much just recycles the nascent music-video ideas he'd concocted for Hard Day's Night, but we're talking about wholly blissful interludes all the same. The one huge shock for me, which will likely be meaningless to most of you, involves composer Ken Thorne's pseudo-Bond score—specifically, one small piece of it, heard about ten minutes into the movie, during the transition into the montage sequence of five additional attempts to steal Ringo's ring. It was very familiar to me, and after the last two notes sounded, "Help!"—the song—started playing in my head, though not onscreen. Turns out I had completely forgotten, 33 years after buying the aforementioned Beatles CDs (Help! was released later in '87, I believe), that I'd first become familiar with this film's title track via The Beatles: 1962–1966, a.k.a. The Red Album. Which I'd owned on vinyl, on account of I am ancient. And on that album, "Help!" is preceded by the snippet of Thorne's phony Bond music. For years, I just assumed that was actually part of the song. But I'd long since forgotten that it once had an "overture," and hearing said overture in another context, for the first time in over three decades, was hugely disorienting. And now I kinda want it back, despite knowing that it shouldn't be there. Unfortunately, I can't find a YouTube video that includes both the fanfare and the song itself, but this is how I thought "Help!" began from the age of about 12 (when I finally discovered the Beatles, no thanks whatsoever to my parents) until I was 19. Just imagine the song proper starting immediately afterward.