by Kirk Woodward
[The article below, Kirk Woodward’s examination of the Beatles’ 1965 movie Help!, will be my friend’s 100th solo contribution to Rick On Theater (plus one collaboration with me). Of those previous 99 posts, some of which were multipart contributions, six have been about the Beatles or one of its former members.
[I’ve been a fan of the Beatles since I first heard them on the radio when I was a high school student in Europe in the early ’60s. (“She Loves Me” was released in the U.K. at the end of August 1963, just as I was about to start school outside Geneva. We listened to rock ’n’ roll on BBC radio, Radio Luxembourg, and pirate radio.) But my enthusiasm pales before Kirk’s loyalty. In addition to that, Kirk knows music, which I don’t, so he applies that to his fandom as well.
[Furthermore, as a longtime theater student, with experience as an actor, director, and playwright—as well as a composer and lyricist—Kirk has a perspective on the Beatles’ film output that’s, if not unique, then at least rare. The proof is below. If you don’t know Help!, the group’s second film, Kirk’s discussion will make you want to see it. If you do know it, it’ll change your appreciation of it.
[You know what the Beatles said: “Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.” (Yeah, I know that’s not what they really meant. But it’s what I mean!)]
In the late 1960’s, some of us studying at Washington and Lee University were fortunate to spend some days in London on summer theater trips organized by the school’s drama professor, Lee (really Leonel) Kahn.
Lee had connections with the British theater world and arranged to bring in as lecturers a number of young and exciting professionals from England, some of whom would go on to careers of success and importance, like the playwrights and screenwriters Christopher Hampton (now Sir Christopher, b. 1946) and David Mercer (1928-1980).
Our lecturers introduced us to the most exciting elements of British theater of the time. From London I wrote my mother:
Something else which came out in a lecture
this morning is that the Beatles have had an important influence on one kind of
British theater. The line goes:
”Goon Show” (Spike Mulligan, Peter Sellers,
etc.)
V
Beatles (sense of humor, the looseness of
their stage shows and their strong relation to the audience)
V
Street theater, small-group theater,
improvisations (akin to off-off-Broadway)
I would modify some of what I wrote my mother: the Beatles’ stage shows were “loose” only in the sense that they never seemed “canned” – there was always a personally spontaneous element in their appearances. And I should have mentioned that their influence spilled into many areas besides theater, in particular, music (of course), fashion, and, our topic here, film.
I have written about the Beatles several times for this blog. In this article I am writing about their second film, Help!, a film that has influenced theater and other arts as well.
Help! was filmed and released in 1965. It followed the Beatles’ brilliant and wildly successful first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). Both films were directed by the American expatriate Richard Lester (b. 1932), who began his career by directing advertisements and who developed a style of filmmaking involving a quick pace, rapid and unexpected shifts between shots, and humor that often verged on the surreal.
Both A Hard Day’s Night and Help! exhibit these traits, but they are very different films. A Hard Day’s Night is a black and white film. Focusing on an imagined day or so in the lives of the four Beatles, it is concise, with a script written by Alun Owen (1925-1994) filmed on an extremely tight budget, wasting no space.
Help!, a year later, had, as Richard Lester has said, a somewhat larger budget, and was shot in color, with an expansive script written by Mark Behm (1925-2007), otherwise best known for his delightful screenplay of the mystery film Charade (1963). Behm’s script for Help! was given touches of dialogue and plot by Charles Wood (1932-2020), about whom I will say more below.
In contrast to the very England-bound A Hard Day’s Night, Help! takes place in England, the Alps, back in England again, and finally in the Bahamas. Critical opinion tends to consider A Hard Day’s Night a masterpiece, and Help! nowhere near as successful.
I consider this ranking, if I may use the word, baloney. The films are different in significant ways, and I admire A Hard Day’s Night, but I love Help! I seldom feel the need to watch A Hard Day’s Night, but Help! is one of my favorite movies.
Why? For starters, it has the Beatles in it, and although that fact by itself may not justify enthusiasm (as it does not quite, sadly, for Magical Mystery Tour, their self-made film of 1968), it certainly contributes.
In A Hard Day’s Night, as Richard Lester explains in a video introduction to the film, the focus is the public lives of the Beatles; the logical next step would have been a film about their private lives, but, Lester says, at that time their private lives were rated “X.”
The agreed-on answer was to let the Beatles be the center of an experience that revolved around them, hence the film’s plot: members of an Eastern cult worship with a daily sacrifice, but the mandatory sacrificial ring has disappeared – it has ended up on Ringo’s finger, and it won’t come off, despite the best efforts of the cult, as well as two renegade British scientists who want it for their own purposes. Ringo’s life is in danger as long as he wears the ring.
That’s the plot. Right up front it must be said that the film could not possibly be made today, certainly not in the way it exists now, with English actors playing Indian members of a religion seen as murderous and barbaric (supposedly based on Thugs, an alleged murderous gang that terrorized India for decades). A viewer today has a lot of ignoring to do. Whether or not to, of course, is an individual decision.
In any case, the plot is outlandish and absurd, and rendered completely non-realistic by Richard Lester’s directorial style. In an essay in the 2007 video release of Help!, the director Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) writes that Lester
had an extraordinary sense of pace and
motion, in the editing and in the
movement of the people onscreen. . . . Most of all, it was the freedom, the
feeling that the structure of the picture could bend and twist to accommodate
the spirit of youth. . . that you could
play with form and structure and break as many rules as you wanted as long as
you had a strong emotional core – this was what Lester gave us. . . . You were let in on the joke, and that made it
even funnier.
What about the Beatles? As themselves they are wonderful, of course – they’re the Beatles. One cannot help watching them; they are energetic and entertaining and yet they have an odd reserve about them – they’re keeping something private. All the songs they wrote for the film remain classics; they were practically exploding as songwriters at this period, with “Yesterday” one of the songs on the British album of Help! (but not used in the movie). Not bad.
As for their acting, it presents an interesting study in movie performing. Ringo, who shone as an actor in A Hard Day’s Night, continues to charm and amuse. John and George, who are not showcased as much as Ringo, succeed by underplaying everything. They are both delightfully deadpan.
Paul’s performance is a different matter. In general, underacting is the best approach to acting in film, and overacting the worst. I don’t know in what order the scenes of Help! were shot, but in the earlier part of the movie Paul makes “facial expressions” and basically tries too hard. The good news is that he calms down as the film goes on, and is fine by halfway or so through the movie.
In general, the Beatles are the more or less relaxed center of the turmoil of Help!, and there is plenty of turmoil. Topics presented and satirized in the movie include: war, the justice system, the military, science, British technology, government, the police, and religion, all of it accompanied by heavy doses of violence involving knives, poison gas, tanks, lasers, and savage man-eating animals.
This is a film about a rock band? This is comedy? Well, yes, or perhaps more accurately it is farce, which, as Eric Bentley writes in The Life of the Drama (1964), is “generally the fantasy of innocence surrounded by malevolence.” Richard Lester’s style, as I have described it here, is a farce style – which is not to say that it is frivolous.
In fact, in choosing Charles Wood to work on the script of the film, Lester chose a writer particularly fascinated by war and its effects. Wood wrote frequently about military life and action, and notably went on to write the screenplay for How I Won the War (1967), a surreal antiwar film that featured John Lennon as a soldier who, along with many others, is killed.
The scene in Help! where the Beatles record on Salisbury Plain, near Stonehenge, in particular shows Wood’s influence, with the modern British Army providing a protective ring of tanks around the Beatles, while the enemy, in World War I garb with a mixture of weapons, waits for sappers to dig under the recording area and set off deadly explosives. There is a battle, which leads to a retreat and apparently ends tragically. . . .
Among the other subjects treated extensively in the film, organized religion takes a particularly strong beating, including a scene in which Clang, the High Priest, treats an Anglican minister to a long string of ecclesiastical platitudes, and a scene in which Ringo mutters, “It’s a different religion from ours. I think.”
Richard Lester told the press when the film was released, “You’ll find nothing new about Help!. There’s not one bit of insight into a social phenomenon of our times.” Except, of course, for the phenomena of war, the justice system, the military, science, British technology, government, the police, and religion!
All this points to one of the ways the film was influential. Help! demonstrated on a large and widely viewed platform that the illusion of realism in movies was not a requirement for addressing serious issues in film.
They could be presented fancifully, comically, bizarrely – there were few limits, as long as they were handled with the appropriate style, and Lester knew what that style could be. Help! opened a large door to new kinds of expression of opinion.
And others went through that door, as two examples will illustrate. One is that the film, and Magical Mystery Tour which followed it (although not terribly successfully), showed the way for what was shortly to become the Monty Python troupe (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin), in terms of the use of quick cuts, topic changes, and bizarre juxtapositions.
An example comes toward the center of Help!, when a title card announces an intermission, followed by a short scene of the Beatles in the forest, with one of them appearing to bounce another like a ball. . . followed by a card announcing the second part, a short scene between two Indian women, one the recently saved human sacrifice and the other her clearly English mother . . . followed by another title card, and the resumption of the movie.
Some of Lester’s stylistic effects were the result of necessity; although he had a bigger budget for Help!, it wasn’t extravagant. He had to make the most of what he had. Some of the shots in the film probably would have been reshot under other circumstances. But in the environment he created, they didn’t matter. He led the audience to accept whatever he did.
If one is going to take the kind of risks that Lester takes, it helps to have talent. One example that stands out for me is that while filming on the mountain slopes of Switzerland, it was difficult to find spaces where crowds weren’t surrounding the Beatles, and one of those spaces had telephone poles with wires across it.
Lester solved the problem by superimposing musical notes from “Ticket to Ride,” the song being played that moment, on the wires, as though the wires were staves in a music score. That’s creativity; that’s talent.
When putting together film of the Beatles playing together, Lester decided not to care whether or not they made logical sense. For example, in the song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” Ringo is seen playing the drums, and, in one shot, the bongos, although logically that couldn’t happen in one runthrough of the song. Countless videos since Help! have taken off from what Lester developed in part out of necessity. (The Monkees, whose TV show first aired in 1966, took the hint immediately.)
Countless videos since Help! have taken off from what Lester developed in part out of necessity. When putting together film of the Beatles playing together, he decided not to care whether or not they made logical sense. For example, in the song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” Ringo is seen playing the drums, and, in one shot, the bongos, although logically that couldn’t happen in one runthrough of the song.
I wonder if what I’ve been saying gives the impression that the Beatles didn’t have much to do with the influence of Help!. Clearly that is not so. The Beatles made it happen, they cooperated with it, they were in the middle of it, and their sense of humor is the inspiration for it. They were personalities, and those personalities lent themselves to experimentation.
In fact, the biggest problem the Beatles had in filming Help! is that they had already made one movie, and they hated to repeat anything they had already done. As a result they spent a lot of filming time stoned, they were casual about learning lines, and they never got around to making a third major movie; they just couldn’t be bothered.
But not wanting to repeat themselves– wanting continually to take a fresh approach – is the essence of what Richard Lester did, and what A Hard Day’s Night and Help! do. The Beatles brought a conscious search for newness into the world of popular art, including film – and theater. I would claim, among other early results of this approach, “rock musicals” such as Hair (1967), and groups like the Firesign Theatre (1966 on), who, using a radio drama format, performed on stage extensively, and frequently invoked the Beatles – an influence acknowledged by both Firesign and Python members.
Here is one personal example of the latter. George Harrison, in particular, seems to have thought of the Monty Python troupe as the logical successor to the Beatles. In a recent comment in this blog, Rick, commenting on a play I wrote about theater superstitions, said:
The play, which Kirk wrote late in 2019, long
before I even thought of this post, reminds me of a Monty Python sketch! I can
actually hear the Pythons doing it. (Kirk and I are both fans of the Pythons,
and he agreed that ‘That Scottish Play’ “is definitely like a Python sketch!” –
though he’s “not sure I consciously had that in mind” when he composed it.) [See “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater
Superstitions – Part 1” (14 August 2020), Comment dated 6 September 2020.]
There – a direct line from my recent play, through the Pythons, to the Beatles. That’s influence. When I wrote my mother, I was correct – I had no idea at the time how correct –that “improvisations” were one way the Beatles had influenced theater, and those improvisations helped spawn the Pythons.
That’s just one example of their influence. I am certainly not saying that they invented the performance world we experience today – for example, improvisation existed long before the Beatles; so did theater for that matter. But they made possible multiple new approaches in the performance arts, and to this day we enjoy the benefits.
[I was on the same trip to London in the summer of 1969 that Kirk took. (Kirk and I were classmates at W&L and we both worked with Lee Kahn.) The program was housed in a dormitory of the University of London and along with the shows we saw, we had, as Kirk reports, meetings with and lectures from a number of theater figures, both pros and academics, at the dorm. At one of those sessions, a talk by playwright Christopher Hampton, an incident centering on John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger drew me up short.
[Hampton, a resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre whose play The Philanthropist was about to open at the theater as I remember, came to speak to us about the rise of the contemporary theater (or something like that—I forget the actual topic after 51 years). In his discussion, Hampton mentioned that an important influence in his artistic development was the original production of Look Back in Anger in 1956, which he'd seen when he was 10. I quickly did the math and figured out that Hampton—born in January 1946—is the same age as I am. (I’m almost exactly 11 months younger than Hampton.)
[I was immediately depressed because here he was, a produced playwright of some renown already and here I was, sitting, as it were, at his feet, having accomplished nothing so far in my life. He's gone on to write several important plays, including Total Eclipse (1967) and Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), and a batch of screenplays and opera librettos, while I have gone on . . . to continue to do nothing of significance—with the possible exception, says Kirk graciously, of starting Rick On Theater; but that’s only a late development. Ah, well . . . such are the inequities of life!
[Kirk has a special attachment—critical, to be sure—to Help! I have one to A Hard Day’s Night, but it’s visceral. It’s also more to the title song than to the whole film and is connected to a very specific memory.
[The movie was released in Europe, where I was living at the time, in July 1964, less than a year before I took a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union over spring vacation with a group from my school in Geneva. (The French title is Quatre garçons dans le vent, literally “Four boys in the wind,” but its idiomatic sense is “Four boys in fashion” or, more colloquially, “Four hip guys.” The German title, incidentally, is simply Yeah Yeah Yeah.)
[The songs from the film were in all our heads, and one of our group, a boy from a really wealthy family, had brought along an electric guitar and a complete portable amp system (which we had set up in the train compartment for our cross-continental journey from Geneva to Warsaw). I’m sure he played the soundtrack and we sang that song over and over on that long train voyage.
[Skipping ahead a couple of days, we were in the Soviet Union and on a flight from Moscow to Leningrad when I remembered something vital: our adult chaperone was supposed to have arranged to pick up my visa for Hungary from the Hungarian embassy in Moscow!
[The Hungarians had refused to issue me a visa through the embassy in Bern the way all my schoolmates had gotten theirs—I carried a diplomatic passport and visas for Western diplomats had to be issued by the foreign ministry in Budapest—so I was supposed to pick it up in Moscow. But the faculty leader had forgotten and so had I (I was all of 18 at the time), and we were en route to Leningrad.
[When we couldn’t get the visa at the Hungarian consulate in Leningrad or, next, in Kiev, we had to arrange for me to fly over Hungary and meet the group in Vienna. So they all took off by train to Budapest and I waited in Kiev for a plane to Vienna the next day.
[Alone and without rubles except what I needed to get through the day, I had to kill time somehow. So I wandered around the city—I spoke a little Russian but no Ukrainian—and sang “A Hard Day’s Night” to myself over and over.
[I was a little relieved to get to Vienna—Austria was a relatively free country and I spoke German by then, so I could get around and talk to people—but I still had almost no cash until the group arrived in town some hours after I did. So I walked and sang “A Hard Day’s Night” some more!
[To this day, I can’t hear that song—which, like most Beatles tunes, I still love—without flashing back to that spring trip 55 years ago to Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Vienna . . . but not Budapest; I never got there.]
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