Production of the Beatles’ second film was announced on 30 October 1964. The success of A Hard Day’s Night meant that the new film would enjoy the luxury of colour, its budget would be doubled to £500,000, and the group would be reunited with Richard Lester as director. American screenwriter Marc Behm (Charade) would collaborate with Lester’s colleague Charles Wood (The Knack). And so that the Beatles wouldn’t have to carry the entire film, a slew of experienced comic actors, including Leo McKern, Victor Spinetti, Patrick Cargill and Roy Kinnear, along with the not-so-experienced Eleanor Bron, were cast alongside them. Filming was scheduled to start on 23 February.
The original title for the film, after the stop-gap Beatles Production 2, or Beatles Two for short, was Ringo’s rather convoluted suggestion Eight Arms To Hold You. The point at which this changed to Help!, and whether the song was written to suit the film title, or whether the film title based on an existing song, has something of the chicken-and-egg about it. Ray Coleman, in his John Lennon biography, suggests that John had already written the song, which was so strong that a change of film title was inevitable. What’s most likely, however, is that the film’s title changed when neither John nor Paul could come up with a song with such an abstruse title as ‘Eight Arms To Hold You’ (particularly given that ‘From Me To You’ already had the line “I got arms that long to hold you”), and a song was written to order. The 17 April edition of Melody Maker reported, “they complete filming Eight Arms To Hold You in about a month”. The Beatles Book of May 1965 broke the news that the new film would probably not be Eight Arms To Hold You, and that John and Paul had revealed that “the title of a song they wrote on April 4th might well replace it”. Journalistic licence seems to have been at play in a report in the 8 May Melody Maker, “The title was chosen when the Beatles were filming a scene with a live tiger at Twickenham. When it appeared the boys simultaneously shouted ‘Help!’ Director Richard Lester said: ‘You’ve got it, that’s the title!’”
Unofficially, it seems that the title Help had been bandied around for some time, even before Eight Arms To Hold You reared its head. Richard Lester, in notes to the 2007 DVD re-release of the film, recalls that he and the writers had always wanted the film to be called Help, but that this was already registered as a film title. After frantic calls to the lawyers, it was agreed that the title could be used if an exclamation mark were added. The song, Lester remembers, was recorded the following evening, and the change of title announced the next day.
The album was recorded in a dozen sessions, most of which took place in mid-February and in mid-June 1965, the first taking place the day after Ringo returned from his brief three-day honeymoon with Maureen. During six sessions on consecutive days they recorded all the songs for the film – apart from ‘Help!’ itself, as the film was at this stage still untitled – together with ‘Tell Me What You See’ and ‘You Like Me Too Much’. The group then flew from Heathrow to the Bahamas to begin filming, working for fifteen days with no break before returning home. Two days later, they were on the 11 am flight to Salzburg for a week’s filming at the nearby ski resort of Obertauern. Back in the UK, the film was completed between 24 March and 11 May at Twickenham Studios and on locations including Salisbury Plain and Cliveden House in Berkshire. ‘Help!’ and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ were recorded during the filming schedule – in fact, each was recorded in a separate evening session following a day’s filming. Both sessions finished after 11 pm, with a full day’s filming taking place the following day. The remaining album tracks were taped between 14 and 17 June.
For the Help! sessions, the group developed a couple of different ways of recording that reduced the amount of paperwork and documentation involved for the sessions. The first was to record their rehearsal takes, and then spool back the tape to record the takes proper. Although this went against EMI policy of not reusing magnetic tape for reasons of recording quality, it meant a more efficient way of working. Furthermore, the group would drop overdubs onto basic rhythm tracks, which again could be done at will. They could therefore tape as many overdubs as necessary to get the perfect take, which previously would have been individually numbered. The result is that songs would officially be recorded in a couple of takes, masking the amount of work and true number of takes that had gone into the recording.
Help! and Rubber Soul are notable for having their stereo versions remixed by George Martin for their 1987 CD release. He readily admits that in 1965, “I was learning too. When I started in 1962 with the Beatles, we only made mono records. By the time 1967 came along, with Pepper and so on, I’d got five years experience and I was able to make a fairly good stereo record.” Mono was still very much the primary format at the time, to the extent that on 18 June 1965, for example, six tracks (including ‘Help!’) were mixed for mono in 2½ hours in the morning, and the same six tracks mixed for stereo in an hour that afternoon. So when he became involved in EMI’s programme of releases for CD, to be staggered throughout 1987, he vetoed release of the existing stereo Help! and Rubber Soul, the earliest of the group’s albums to be released in stereo on CD, before he had remixed them himself. In fact, he told the New York Times that EMI had contacted him just a few weeks before the release date of the first four albums. These were meant to be released in stereo, but he was so appalled by the mix that EMI had made, the company agreed that these four would be released only in mono, and that after the remixed Help! and Rubber Soul, subsequent CD releases would adhere to the original mixes.
The LP cover was also shot at Twickenham. Photographer Robert Freeman, for his fourth Beatle cover, had seen the group film a sequence in Austria where they stood on the skyline waving their arms to a playback of ‘Ticket To Ride’. This gave him the idea for the cover, although the idea for using semaphore to spell out ‘HELP’ must have come later as the title had still not been finalised when the sequence was shot. He recreated the scene in front of a white back-drop at Twickenham, with the group sporting the hats capes and coats from the film wardrobe. However, art ultimately prevailed over telecommunications, as the semaphore on the cover of the LP actually spells out ‘NUJV’ (or ‘NVUJ’ on the Capitol cover): “When we came to do the shot the arrangement of the arms with those letters didn’t look good. So we decided to improvise and ended up with the best graphic positioning of the arms.” As for With The Beatles, Freeman’s original vision of the LP sleeve was stark and minimal, but was ultimately overruled by the perceived necessity of spelling out the name of the group. “I think the cover would have had more impact with just the Beatles in the white space and no lettering at all. After all, they were at the height of their fame and easily recognisable. What they didn’t need was HELP!”
Seven new songs appear in the film:
‘Help!’ – under the opening credits
‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ – set in a recording studio, with Paul occasionally on piano, Ringo occasionally on bongos
‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ – played to Eleanor Bron in the Beatle house
‘Ticket To Ride’ – recorded in the snow of the Alps
‘I Need You’ – on Salisbury Plain, quickly followed by
‘The Night Before’ – also on Salisbury Plain, intercut with on ‘She’s A Woman’ tape and so is incomplete
‘Another Girl’ – on the tiny Balmoral Island in the Bahamas
The incidental music, in addition to the snatches of James Bond-like themes, includes arrangements of ‘She’s A Woman’, including bursts in Indian style, in the Alps and in the Bahamas; ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, played by a group in an Indian restaurant, and by cello and orchestra in the Bahamas; ‘You Can’t Do That’ in the Alps; ‘From Me To You’ and ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’. Reworked orchestral versions of ‘From Me To You’, ‘You Can’t Do That’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ arranged by Ken Thorne, the film’s musical director, and played by the George Martin Orchestra appeared on the US version of the Help! LP.
This North American version was a particularly poor treatment of the Beatles’ songs – arguably the worst of the alternative Capitol albums – and sounded the death knell for Dave Dexter Jr’s involvement in Beatle music. Dexter was responsible for screening releases from Capitol’s mother company, EMI, to determine their suitability for American release. Dexter it was, therefore, that turned down the first four Beatles singles until persuaded to release ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ in 1963. He subsequently reconfigured the group’s LP releases for the US market, which admittedly required fewer track on an album and for hit singles to be included, unlike the norm for LPs in the UK. His greatest sin in the ears of many was to plaster a number of tracks in reverb to attempt to generate the excitement of a live performance.
The Capitol LP nevertheless topped the Billboard chart for nine weeks, of course, but this was despite the dilution of Beatles tracks with bland incidental music and the gatefold sleeve adding a dollar to the sale price. One thing that can be said for Capitol’s Help! soundtrack, however, is that the addition of Asian-tinged incidental music was rather prescient, making it the first instance of the Beatles’ music being put in an Indian context.
The Help! movie would inevitably be more contrived than A Hard Day’s Night, which made a virtue of its spontaneity and roughness. Now with colour film stock, a script with a plot and a gallery of co-stars, as opposed to (Wilfred Brambell apart) a supporting cast, it would have to be more carefully planned. There was the inevitable danger that the film would be disappointing, as sequels, desperate to emulate an unexpected success, nearly always are. Realising the opportunities available to them, the Beatles suggested scenes in the Alps (as they fancied a skiing holiday to relieve the boredom of filming) and the Bahamas (for the want of a more exotic location). The suggestion of filming in the Bahamas was also encouraged for strictly fiscal reasons. Richard Lester remembered “Very early on, before we’d even finished the script, it came from on high, which is essence was from Brian Epstein, that it’s really, really, really important that we shoot in the Bahamas. So we wrote Bahama scenes.”
A shift in the Beatles’ experience that occurred between A Hard Day’s Night and Help! was the move from pills to pot as the group’s recreational medicament of choice. As John put it, “Help! was where we turned on to pot and dropped drink, simple as that. I’ve always needed a drug to survive. The others too, but I always had more, I always took more pills and more of everything, cause I’m more crazy probably.” Although they had all tried the drug in the early Cavern days, meeting Bob Dylan in New York on 28 August 1964 consummated the marriage between moptops and marijuana. Dylan was incredulous at their lack of experience with the drug, assuming the lyrics to ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ included the line “I get high …”.
The group’s respect for Dylan possibly made their first “official” encounter with marijuana more significant as a single event, but the timing of their introduction to the drug was ideal for John and Paul as songwriters and all four as hard-working musicians. Cynthia’s perspective is interesting: “Marijuana was a giggle to the boys and it enabled them to relax … When they smoked, the merry-go-round stopped for a while. The world looked brighter.”
The reaction of the Beatles themselves to the film was mixed, and evolved over time. At the time John, who would star in Lester’s 1967 satire How I Won The War before turning his back on acting as an occupation, was ambivalent: “We went wrong with the picture somehow. I enjoyed filming it; I’m sort of satisfied, but not smug about it. It’ll do. We couldn’t do it any better than that, ’cause we’re not capable enough actors to make it any better than that … it’s a bit of a let-down when it gets to the Bahamas.” He later found praise for Richard Lester’s Batman style of filming, which he felt was somewhat ahead of its time, but lamented that the film was “bullshit” and “nothing to do with the Beatles”.
Paul felt the enterprise was “higgledy-piggledy” with a “lousy script”, and agreed with John that they felt like “guest stars in our own movie”. Although not bad as a fun romp, Help! was, he felt, not up to the standard of A Hard Day’s Night. George was initially uncertain, and expressed the vain hope that the film would contain no songs, because of the artifice: “I don’t like these films where everybody bursts into song for no reason”. In the event, the film was truly life-changing in that he was introduced to Indian music and philosophy, which would define his thinking and outlook for the rest of his life.
Only Ringo was left with any real cinematic aspirations. He appeared in a handful of frankly mediocre films in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside major stars such as Marlon Brando and Richard Burton (Candy), Peter Sellers (The Magic Christian) and, improbably, the 85-year-old Mae West (Sextette).
The critics and the public received Help! less favourably than the group’s first effort, although Kenneth Tynan, who found the title song “the most haunting Beatle composition to date”, called the film “a brilliant, unboring but ferociously ephemeral movie … a shiny forgettable toy”.
In the group’s own field of expertise, however, the album was an unqualified success. Help! was the first ever LP to go straight in at number one in the UK album charts, at the time an extraordinary achievement, and one which the group would go on to repeat four more times.