'Help!' at 50: Looking back at the Beatles

Brian Mansfield | USA TODAY

Fifty years ago Wednesday, Beatlemania returned to the big screen.

On July 29, 1965, Help!,the second film from The Beatles, premiered at London's Pavilion Theatre. The Fab Four's bigger-budget follow-up to the tremendously successful and well-received A Hard Day's Night a year before, Help! had its first U.S.screening in Chicago 11 days later, then opened wide on Aug. 25.

Charles Brinkman, then a night-time deejay at Pittsburgh Top 40 radio station KQV-AM, remembers the film opening at a Pittsburgh theater too small to accommodate everyone who wanted to see the Beatles in color.

"It was a complete flashback to what it had been when they had done their concert in Pittsburgh in September of '64," Brinkman says. "Beatlemania was still as strong as ever. It was a typical mass-appeal Beatle night, with tons of teenage girls."

At the time, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther described Help! as "90 crowded minutes of good, clean insanity" in an attempt "to save himself from being injured by mobs of young females and floods of mail. No one can really take exception to hearing the humor of the Beatles called insane."

A half-century later, the humor and style of Help! seems, if not dated, at least very much of its time. Still, the impact it had on such TV touchstones as Batman and The Monkees, as well as many music videos shown during MTV's first decade, continues to resonate in pop culture.

"A Hard Day's Night is more critically acclaimed, but Help!had a pop-art quality that is really cool," says. Lauren Onkey, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's VP of education and public programs.

In a famous scene from the film, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr practice skiing in the Austrian Alps while their chart-topping Ticket to Ride plays over the surreal settings, jump frames and quick cuts. So many directors took the montage as a template that, in 1984, MTV presented Richard Lester, who also directed A Hard Day's Night, with a special award as "Father of the Music Video."

Help! also gave Starr, often relegated to the back of the stage behind the drum kit, his biggest moment in the limelight.

"Lester saw how comfortable Ringo was in front of the camera in A Hard Day's Night," says Michael Seth Starr, author of a new Starr biography called Ringo: With a Little Help but no relation to the drummer. "Out of all four of the Beatles, he had generated the most critical acclaim.

"When they moved on to make the movie that turned out to be Help!, they turned to Ringo to be the 'star' of the movie. He had a very natural presence on camera. He played comedy very well."

Help! wasn't the Beatles' best film, which would have been A Hard Day's Night. It wasn't the group's most personal film. That would have been Let It Be. But it was an entertainingly fast-paced spoof of James Bond movies that took the group to Austria, the Bahamas and various locales in England.

It also might have been rock music's first stoner film.

"The whole film had a kind of mad quality to it," Richard Lester said in an interview that appeared in a 2007 DVD reissue of the film, "and I think that that was helped undoubtedly by the fact that … an awful lot of pot-smoking was being done."

In interview for the 1995 documentary TV special The Beatles Anthology, Ringo recalled filming a scene in which a curling stone was replaced by a bomb and he and McCartney were instructed to run out of the shot. "Paul and I ran about seven miles," he said. "We ran and ran, just so we could stop and have a joint before we came back."

If the members of the Beatles were expanding their minds with marijuana, they also were expanding their musical vocabulary on the songs for the film and its accompanying album, released Aug. 13 in the U.S., two days before the group launched its second tour of the country at New York's Shea Stadium.

"It was a tremendous period of musical growth," Onkey says, noting the influence of Bob Dylan on Lennon's songwriting, particularly on You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, and of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson on increasingly sophisticated vocal arrangements on songs like Help! and You're Gonna Lose That Girl.

Help! may always live in the shadow of A Hard Day's Night, but its songs hold up as some of the group's finest, and the film has its own special place in the Beatles canon.

"It's a fun film about the Beatles knowing they're the Beatles," Onkey says. "You can trace its influence on music videos and other things, but it's fun. Rock stars can run around the world and do crazy things."