Well, to start with, it was all of those things listed above and more, but also a far cry from the enhanced documentary that made A Hard Day's Night work across decades. This is before you get to the now unacceptable racial comic stereotypes and highly uneven whimsy that add up to a mess with good songs.
There is a plot. A sacrificial candidate to a Kaliesque Indian cult cannot be executed because she sent the ritual ruby ring to Ringo as a fan gift. This sets the ersatz Thugees on the trail of the Beatle to either retrieve the ring or sacrifice him by a deadline. The Beatles seek assistance from several sources like Indian mystics, jewellers, Scotland Yard and some rogue scientists who discover the ring's potential for weaponry and join the chase. The chase takes them to the Austrian Alps and The Bahamas among other locales and everything kind of romps home to the end credits.
While there are Anglo-Indian cast members, the main roles of the Thugee cult are played by a sub-cast drawn from British talent at the time like Leo McKern, John Bluthal, Eleanor Bron etc. They are in various stages of blackface and affect the kind of accents that even the canonical Goons sported when a quick laugh was needed. There's really no pedalling back from this, although there is a meta commentary in the Indian restaurant scene where all the staff are played by Cockney's who mention union regulations.
That reminded me of something much later, the Yiddish speaking Native Americans of Blazing Saddles and, later still, the tribal characters in Cannibal The Musical who are played by Koreans who protest their Native American authenticity. Both of these examples stand spotless in the frequently dodgy comedy of both those film makers. The restaurant staff almost redeem things but once that scene has played we're back to the goodness-gracious-me bad guys. The only reason they are Indian at all is because of the deadly cult of the scary Asian climes. I've just imagined the cult as West Country Druids and it's immediately funnier. This is spilt milk, of course. I would oppose revisionism to wield an AI brush to this one. If you sit in front of it you are going to get some tidbits from the playbook of The British Raj by way of end-of- pier comedians and panto.
A cleverer counterpoint to this is the scientist constantly complaining about the build quality of British supervillain weapons. His use of and disgust for the various lasers and mismatches of international power connections plays like a smart parody of Bond movies' catalogues of spy weapons and would have sat comfortably in an episode of the spy-fi show The Avengers and certainly found regular appearances in the soon to appear Get Smart. Could The Fabs have squared off against the boffins as main baddies with music technology forces like guitar feedback? They'd already done I Feel Fine, by then. Ok, that is the kind of embarrassingly goofy thing that a groovy minded senior of the time might have thought up, but it's the end of my holidays and I'm overheating.
And where are The Beatles themselves in all this? On the sidelines with dialogue wisecracks more zany than funny, action-mannequins in their own movie. It's important to remember that initial screenings of this film were to the demographic who screamed like Boeing jets every time one of the guys had a close up. Almost all the humour is aimed at that bullseye and, where it had been percussive and genuinely funny in the first film, doesn't really have to do much in this one as the comedy focus is aimed away from the stars and on to the cast of clowny others.
What you do get, though, is the songs of the first side of the album of the same name which have them at the peak before Rubber Soul pushed them irrevocably into the critical stratosphere. All of them play like contemporary music videos (the title track actually is an old timey performance clip). All the song writers, teamed or individual, are approaching heights of craft.
As you watch these performances and witness the sidelining of the stars it might well occur to you that you are looking at celebrities in a bubble. They are both too well known and approaching unknowable at this stage. The gigs keep getting bigger and the hits keep coming. The interviews get more guarded and the blackened windows of their limos are wound all the way up. They can't make another Hard Day's Night, it, oddly, would now appear too contrived, too fake. This precursor to the Batman and Monkees TV shows is about as candid as they can allow themselves. The members of the band were a lot less enthused about this film than the first one. They'd grown creatively restless and the I-love-she-loves-we-love assembly line had already frayed beyond repair. They'd seen the mightiest adoration that any small collective of their species could and the only thing new to them was lurking in the shadows. And they'd adopted slower drugs, getting through each pincushion day in a haze of cannabis coughs.
I wonder what a third film might have been like in this series, a movie after the adventurous and darker corners of the Revolver album were known to their fans and the general public. A psychedelic pioneer? Ninety minutes of solipsistic twaddle? The closest we get is Lennon's role in Richard Lester's How I Won the War, colourful, absurdist and edgy but destined for the bargain bin. The year after that, when the bubble developed a leak with Magical Mystery Tour, the effort to embrace the weirder times was eclipsed by the more genuinely psychedelic Yellow Submarine cartoon, the year after that. Maybe that's as futile as the single disc White Album that fans persist with, beyond the point where it is either healthy or useful. But that this was the second and last statement of Beatles movie as PR exercise, we were left with what feels like a second episode you watch just to get to the third. Then again, we are talking about a music group.
Help is a film best watched lightly. It doesn't have the quaint pretensions of John Boorman's Catch Us if You Can but is unhampered by the cuteness (however more engaging) Herman's Hermits vehicle Mrs Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter. The Rolling Stones were not a fit for loveable fiction features, being far better suited to documentaries (and what documentaries). The Kinks might have done something intriguing, if they'd been asked. And Cliff was a distant recollection, destined to follow the St. Trinians movie after Christmas lunch.
But that's the thing. Movies built around musical acts have never quite convinced Hard Day's Night does because it was a one off, a fictional documentary made with funny people. The recent The Nowhere Inn with St Vincent playing herself is cushioned with fictive invention and acquits itself as an oddity. More celebrated are the legend makers that blithely pursue the real with gleeful fabrication like Almost Famous. And there are too many like Eddie and the Cruisers or The Doors which lie as embarrassing stains in the carpet that resist cleaning. Help is of its time, offering a high def colour record of how a PR engine overheated, never to start again.
