Why did the Beatles dislike "Help!" the film?

British comedy...

 

there is too short a window for the process...

 

IIRC, John was the only Beatle who ever really complained about Help, and his gripe about being extras in their own film is appropriate, given his self-absorbed personality.

 

I love Help! "Go to the window'" is a quote I still use.

 

But the others seem to be just as distant from it. Maybe not hating it outright, but they seem to talk about it as if it was a great disappointment to them.

 

I don't agree with that. I believe Ringo liked Help, as he was the featured Beatle in it, and George liked the sitar and herbal jazz cigarettes part of it, and Paul likes everything he is involved with, as we know (even MMT).

 

Very possible I didn't gather that properly from the Anthology segment, but I just got the impression it was only memorable for them because of the pot and the on-location filming.

Something else of interest I didn't know: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059260/trivia?item=tr0763674
From IMDb:
"Originally, the Beatles were going to make a western picture. The story was going to be set in Texas and involved the four of them fighting over the affections of a cattle baron's daughter. There are even publicity photos showing them on horseback and wearing cowboy outfits. However the film shut down production and the Beatles ended up making this film instead."

 

when I first saw this at the movies I thought it was strange...

 

yes, Paul is all in! I respect him for that...

 

LOL! after nearly 50 years ppl are still finding a way to add hate, negativity ...HELP!

 

Ha. I live in Colorado, and have been known to mutter "This is a COLD place" occasionally.

 

strange I got a reply alert to this post?

 

I personally think "A Hard Day's Night" is far superior. "Help" is too much like a James Bond takeoff with all the globe-hopping and adventure.

 

Don't forget The Inner Light.

 

Help! is a ton of fun. Harrison does his own stunts.

 

Here's what John thought at the time (August 28, 1965):

Q: Give me a review of "Help!" From - from outside, don't be a Beatle now, be a movie critic.

J: Okay. Well, uh... there's good photography in it. Y'know, if people are keen on photography, you

can watch it for that. There's some good actors in it - not us! 'Cause, y'know, we don't act, we

just sort of -

Q: You're yourselves.

J: - do what we can, y'know, and it's quite hard for them to film that. Leo McKern's exceptional in

it. And so is, uh - Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear, the thin and the fat fellow. They're good

together. The first half of the film's much better than the end, and it - it's a bit of a letdown

when it gets to the Bahamas. That's my view of it, see - I've seen it three times, and - trying to

look at it without thinking of it as our film, y'know.

Q: It's gotta be tough to be objective about a movie that's so involved with yourself, though,

right?

J: You can after a bit, because it - it gets so, sort of - far away that you think, "Well, it isn't us

anyway." You forget that you've made the film. Like when you hear an old record, you think, "Is

that us really?", or - y'know. You can't remember writing the song or recording it or anything.

 

Can't imagine liking MMT more than Help, as I just couldn't get that stoned. That film was done for and by the Beatles, with almost no organiztaion at all. Paul would basically tell them each day that they had to get from point A to point B, and that it was then up them to figure out how, lol. Hard to have a big hit with that formula.

As for Lester being over rated, give me a break. He also did The Three Musketeers, which was a great movie, and was originally planned for the Fab Four themselves. He also directed The Four Musketeers, though it was really just an extension of the first movie that got split off due to length issues.

Can understand some of the Beatles' first impressions about the movie, especially if it wasn't really explained to them by Lester, or anyone else. Secondly it was more story based than character based, at least regarding the Beatles' characters.

My favorite line: "With a ring like that I could, dare I say it, rule the world." The bad guys definitely had most of the better lines in this one, at least from what I can remember.

 

I'm glad that you brought in Petulia, which comes across as a brilliant -- and largely overlooked, and artistically significant -- work nowadays; between that strange, kaleidoscopic masterpiece (which was a major influence on the fractured, ultrapsychedelic, nervous cinematic vibe of the late 60s and beyond) and A Hard Day's Night, Lester places two movies that rank squarely among my favourite ten or twenty films of all time...

Not bad, for someone I don't much consider an auteur along the lines of Altman or Kubrick, to offer up two contemporaries whose work I admire greatly. On some level, Lester's two undisputed classics provide nearly as much gratification and pleasure to me as those of the heavy-hitters I cite above.

I wish I liked Help! more, but it's just a mess. I suspect that all the pot ruined what had been the Beatles' most charming asset in A Hard Day's Night -- that sharp comic timing that had evoked comparisons to the Marx Brothers. Help! just kind of sits there on the screen, and I mostly wait for it to be over.

(The musical sequences are excepted from this judgment -- and I do feel that the [UK] soundtrack LP represents The Missing Link between the Beatlemania Beatles and the Mature Beatles that pulled off Rubber Soul. But Help! is not a music video -- it's supposed to be a movie, and as a movie it simply does not work.)

 

I feel that the Beatles batted about .750 with their movies. A Hard Day's Night is a stone classic, Yellow Submarine captures the vibe of the year of my birth just about exactly perfectly (with all those nods to Peter Max -- what an incredibly fertile creative period!), and Let It Be is this intense little doc about the last days (documentary aficionados groove on this one, I can assure you, despite all of its ambiguities -- or maybe because of them).

Those are the UA movies. I don't much think about Magical Mystery Tour, which feels like a holiday television special, with all of those concomitant pitfalls.

Yet Help! still doesn't make a lot of sense to me -- even as a party movie!

 

Shoot me now, but I've always found watching Help! more enjoyable than watching AHDN, MMT, or LIB, though the quasi documentary, verite, and actual documentary aspects of each of the latter three make them interesting viewing.

 

Why did the Beatles dislike "Help!" the film?

Cause it makes a fine band that was getting more serious about their art look like the Monkees?

 

Kind of got that backwards. The Monkees were a TV show version of Help! And the Beatles admired the show.

 

I know Help came before the Monkees, but it made the Beatles look as goofy as the made-for-TV band that followed them. It's as bad as any Elvis movie, and the Beatles probably were conscious of how cheesy those films made Elvis look.

 

I enjoy Help! as much as any Beatles movie, maybe more so. I'll admit that AHDN is the better movie. However, I enjoy the songs from Help! more than AHDN. Plus, it's in color!

Let It Be is the Beatles film I've never cared for. It's got a dark, depressing vibe to it. The viewer is literally watching the band break up.

 

I threw out 'you've failed, jeweler!' years ago to someone I knew who would get it. he was howling and his wife couldn't understand why. All of a sudden she stopped and said to me 'you said something Beatles related to him, didn't you?'