The Beatles: Help! on PAL Laserdisc

• Cat.no: PLFEB 34301
• Cert: U
• Running time: 101 minutes
• Sides: 2 (CLV)
• Year: 1965
• Pressing: UK, 1996
• Chapters: YES
• Sound: Dolby Surround
• Fullscreen
• Price: £24.99
  

  ---

  Director:

  Richard Lester

  Songs:

  Help!, You’re Gonna Lose That Girl, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Ticket To Ride, I Need You, The Night Before, Another Girl

  Cast:

  The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr)
  Leo Mckern
  Eleanor Bron
  Victor Spinetti
  Roy Kinnear

Equally approachable as thirty year old slice of nostalgia or significant slice of film history, this is at once a highly watchable romp featuring pop music’s first true megastars and a likeable early outing by maverick Brit director Lester (whose prior career includes the previous Beatles’ vehicle A Hard Day’s Night). Beatlemania was in full swing by the mid-sixties, so anything in which the Fab Four appeared was likely to generate volumes of box office takings. Nothing wrong with that (except perhaps, now as then, the gullibility of the public), but in the event Help! proves a much better movie than anyone had the right to expect and stands the test of time extremely well.

True, the villains include a bunch of racially stereotyped Indians with atrocious accents voiced by white actors (despotic leader McKern, sympathetic sidekick Bron) and the finale (to the eponymous Beatles track) consists of little beyond cast members chasing each other around a Bahamas Beach, but such flaws are more than compensated for by its better considered elements. Lester knows his resources well, mustering great panto mugging from his comic cast as solid support for the Fab Four, whose early media presence serves their distinctive personalities well on celluloid as they lark and ripost amongst themselves with gags one presumes sometimes scripted, sometimes not, but always affecting. Lester plays around with captions too – for instance, adding ‘And so did’ as various factions arrive in the Bahamas for the finale.

But most importantly, years before the phrase ‘pop video’ appeared in the common vocabulary, this is stuffed full of them: The Beatles record I Need You on Salisbury Plain before fleeing in a centurion tank from pursuers to the strains of The Night Before; they cavort on ski slopes during Ticket To Ride, Ringo sits in John’s dugout floor bed occasionally bashing the tambourine in synch for You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away. The music was what punters wanted to see, as it were, and Help! serves them well in this respect.

Extras include some trainspottery footage (Salisbury Plain shoot; the film’s royal world première), some unremarkable trailers and – just when you think I’m going to slag them all off – some terrific Pathé News footage of the lads returning to London Airport after their American Tour and being presented with an inaugural Radio Caroline award by a short-haired Simon Dee.

The disc picture seems to vary considerably, the variations probably more to do with quality of cinematography and print than the mastering process. It’s striking, though, how sharp some scenes look (all that crisp snow in Ticket To Ride) compared to the rest. The lack of widescreen is irritating, but aside from one title cut off at screen left, most of the important visual information remains intact within the 4:3 telly frame. Some bizarre chaptering manages generally to start at the beginning of each song, but does silly things like including song plus subsequent scenes in a single chapter, while a number of comic episodes get inexcusable chapter breaks in the middle. Five attempts – announced by appropriate numeral captions – provide the opportunity for at least one chapter start and finish (if not five), but it’s a sadly missed opportunity.

The reason to get Help! on LD is the sound. Not of the whole film – it’s an unremarkable track punctuated by great songs, which suddenly burst from centre speaker mono into glorious remastered stereo – only slightly marred by the intercutting of The Night Before (glorious stereo) with a tape recorder playing a drab, mono She Loves You – Eleanor Bron’s decoy for her betrayed fellow baddies. The throwaway plot (mad Indian religious cult attempt to steal Ringo’s ring) is neither here nor there, but the musical aspect makes this a disc that one will want to return to parts of (i.e. the songs) again and again, besides which, the film’s a lightweight comic gem. Pioneer are to be congratulated for releasing Help!, but it’s a shame about the disc’s shortcomings.