Help! (1965) - film review

A woman is about to be sacrificed in an Eastern religious ceremony when the cult leader, Swami Clang, realises that she is not wearing the sacrificial ring.  Only the one who wears the ring may be sacrificed and at present the ring is on one of the fingers of the Beatles’ drummer, Ringo Starr.   Clang and his high priestess Ahme travel to London to find Ringo and make him their next sacrificial victim.  Realising the danger he is in, Ringo tries to remove the ring, but cannot.  It is fastened to his finger more tightly than a Scotsman to his wallet and nothing will shift it.  In desperation, the four Beatles visit a pair of mad English scientists in the hope that they can find someway to remove the ring...

The Beatles’ follow up to their first film, the hugely successful A Hard Day’s Night (1964), achieved new heights of chaotic lunacy but was another box office hit.  The lame jokes and insane, ludicrously flimsy plot soon become tiresome (after about ten minutes) but The Beatles’ hit songs (which include Help! and Ticket To Ride) keep the audience nailed to their seats and turn what might have been an instantly forgettable comedy disaster into something approaching a cult classic, at least amongst the fans of the Fab Four.  If nothing else, the film shows just what a gloriously mad place England was in the mid 1960s.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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