HELP!

Funny experience, even not so much about music itself. By this time, The Beatles were already experiencing with LSD and traits of these discoveries can be seen here, even famous Fab Four still hadn't developed their "faces" (they looked so uniform with these hair cuts).

Interesting experience, funny when you judge it with year when it was made on mind (e.g. you can't compare it to today's production). Music itself quite fits this film, I especially like Another Girl with Paul holding a girl and playing her like a guitar. It's funny, everyone is taking things easy here (even those that are supposed to be serious) and when I first saw it I was drunk. Even funnier back then.

I'm not sure what I should rate here. Songs, film, it's confusing. I hope I understood it well when I take this as "film" Help!, not soundtrack, not songs, but films itself, review of film.

4(-) as combination of music and film in which it is featured ?

The Beatles were too popular for only one film so this thing was churned out to capitalise on their success. It is a real mish mash and quite hard to sit through unless you are a Beatles fan. The main image that stays with me on this film is when the Beatles visit the Austrian Alps and there is some inspired choreography, such as the Fab Four falling in snow as one with one scarf, which have become iconic for the band. The ski sequences are humourous and worth checking out and indeed appear oon most documentaries. The story is terrible and involves a stupid seance sequence and Ringo is being stalked or something by a soothsayer or fortune teller and weird trippy things happen. The Beatles have fun and are practical jokers throughout, which are real hit or miss affairs, but the songs are definitely quintessential. The best songs are The Night Before, Lennon's soulful You've got to hide your love away, and the boppy tuneful Another Girl, hilarious here as McCartney plays the woman like a guitar. Also I am a fan of Ticket to Ride, the huge single with catchy riff.

The title track has been covered ad infinitum for good reason as it captured a generation, the paranoia of the war, the loneliness and alienation of a technologically advancing society, the terror of the 60s. Or it could just be asking for help. In any case these tracks are wonderful and memorable and the film's greatest moments are when the tracks are heard.

The film itself is rather bland although in colour, A Hard day's Night or Magical Mystery Tour are far better in terms of quality. Overall it is still an enjoyable trip and one for Beatles collectors.

Help! Is a sillier-than-Monty-Python comedy film with much of the same wit (even though it's pre-Python). The movie is very much a James Bond spoof (the James Bond theme with a few notes changed is played throughout), but it is also a spoof of Hinduism and a platform for shots of The Beatles looking oh so hot. As expected, there are cheesy clips of The Beatles playing songs, but they manage to fit in because the rest of the movie doesn't try to be too serious. That being said, it does drag on a little toward the end, but any Beatles fan will gladly pay attention til the credits roll.

And the music, of course, is excellent.

Rating: 7/10

If the "A Hard Day`s Night" film showed The Beatles during a hard day of work, mostly being themselves and really not acting characters and even improvising their parts, this "Help!" film showed them in a film with a story and with them trying to act their parts in a more fixed way in that story. A story which is like a parody from the James Bond film series of the sixties, with some funny scenes, and really showing the acting limitations of the members of the band. Not as good as their first film, but made with much more budget (a film in colour, this time, and filmed in several locations in Europe and in the Bahamas), it even shows some of their wit and charisma, and only by this this film is somewhat funny, but it is maybe their less interesting film, in my opinion, even than their very underrated "Magical Mystery Tour" film from 1967.

I never have seen the films made by Elvis Presley in those years (and I really don`t want to see them), but I have read some reviews about them and they were considered as very bad in quality. I also read in a book written about The Beatles that they even did not like this "Help!" film very much, even calling it as "cardboard". I agree with them. I think that for them making this film was like doing another job that their manager had for them. So, even if they were working very hard composing songs, playing concerts, doing interviews, etc., they still had to make this film. It was the high time of the "Beatlemania" and they were working very hard recording two albums per year from 1963 to 1965, and also recording songs which only were released on singles. It is also very known now that by 1965 they have met Bob Dylan in the U.S., , who introduced them to the use of a herbal substance which they used to have some fun while doing this film. Even they mentioned it, they joked and laughed about this use in the "Anthology" video series.

The second Beatles film, "Help!", first in color, is perhaps the best of their production, from a technical point of view. The band this time is involved in a story with a real plot (a group of people wants to steal the ring of... Ringo, which is connected to Indian deity Kali), where the secondary characters are very well characterized.

The Beatles, who were in the phase of the discovery of marijuana, as Paul and Ringo said in a lot of interviews, often arrived on the set "facts", and the eyes, very red, testify. Because of this problem, it was difficult to be serious on the film set: the fab4 kept laughing and forgetting the text, and they took the film as an opportunity to have fun and have a holiday by the sea and in the mountains. So, they asked to go to the Bahamas and the Alps to ski, a sport they had never done before.

The film is funny, sometimes it seems an action movie, sometimes a yellow genre.

The seven songs of the film are the songs of the first side of the record "Help!" Most are Lennon's songs: Help! The dylanian "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" and the masterpiece "Ticket To Ride". Paul's contribution is of modest quality: "The Night Before", "Another Girl" (Paul will however place two great songs, "Yesterday" and "I've Just Seen a Face" on the B side of the album), that of Harrison, ahimé, of poor quality: "I Need You". Harrison will refer to Rubber Soul.

On the set of this film, thanks to the various Indians present, Harrison will come into contact with the sitar and coup de foudre!

Vote 9. Five Stars.