John Lennon Didn't Like Making One Beatles Movie (But Grew To Appreciate It)

After the success of director Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night" (the "Spice World" of its time), the Beatles were on a roll. The 1964 film was a faux documentary about the musicians' lives, depicting them on the road, playing on trains, and performing songs on television. The film wasn't wholly inaccurate, either. It portrayed the Fab Four as playful, funny, casual blokes from Liverpool who too often had to sprint away from their adoring fans, and that's probably what their lives felt like at the time.

They didn't slow their creative output in 1965, releasing another album/movie two-fer with Lester's "Help!" Compared to "A Hard Day's Night," though, "Help!" is very, very different. A much broader and sillier film, "Help!" is a slapstick farce in which Ringo Starr puts a ring on his finger after receiving it as a gift from a fan. The ring is very tight, however, and it won't come off. Moreover, it turns out the ring is meant to be worn by the sacrificial victim of a distant death cult and was sent to Ringo so its previous owner could avoid being murdered. As a result, the cult (which is led by Leo McKern's Clang) begins stalking the Beatles, trying to get their ring back. Cue the many comedic scenes of the Beatles trying to get the ring off Ringo's finger.

When interviewed by Rolling Stone in 1970 (via Den of Geek), John Lennon admitted that he didn't enjoy making "Help!" It's not that the film was too unconventional for him (seeing as Lennon was also a big fan of the trippy Western "El Topo"); it's just that the Beatle didn't appreciate what Lester was going for (a live-action cartoon, basically) until the Adam West-starring "Batman" TV series and movie came along in 1966.

John Lennon, as mentioned, initially had bad memories of working on "Help!" Unlike "A Hard Day's Night," he and the other Beatles didn't have a lot of creative control over the picture. It was, instead, a scripted comedy, which the Beatles were unprepared for. Lennon also told Rolling Stone that he didn't expect "Help!" to have such a large supporting cast. "We felt like extras in our own movie," he explained, adding:

"The movie was out of our control. With 'A Hard Day's Night,' we had a lot of input, and it was semi-realistic. I realize now that ['Help!'] was a precursor to Batman's 'Pow! Wow!' But Dick Lester never explained that to us. [...] It was like being a frog in a movie about clams."

Lennon reiterated his point when he spoke to Rolling Stone again in 1980 (hat tip to Den of Geek once more), giving what would prove to be his final interview. This time, though, he compared "Help!" to "Batman" in a more positive way. Still, he expressed frustration that Richard Lester never explained that "Help!" was meant to be a farce. On the other hand, he also acknowledged that he and his fellow Beatles were stoned out of their gourds in 1965:

"[The band and Lester] hadn't spent a lot of time together between 'A Hard Day's Night' and ”Help!,' and partly because we were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us. It was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time. In our own world. It's like doing nothing most of the time, but still having to rise at 7 a.m., so we became bored."

One can easily believe Lennon's claims about marijuana consumption once they've watched "Help!"

Circling back to the 1970 Rolling Stone interview, John Lennon confessed that the Beatles took a lot of drugs (not just weed but also "pills" in Lennon's case) while filming "Help!" Still, he noted that this was a pretty standard part of the traveling musician's lifestyle at the time:

"The only way to survive in Hamburg, to play eight hours a night, was to take pills. The waiters gave you them — the pills and drink. I was a f***ing dropped-down drunk in art school. 'Help!' was where we turned on to pot and we dropped drink, simple as that. I've always needed a drug to survive. The others, too, but I always had more, more pills, more of everything because I'm more crazy probably." 

But everyone was on something. Ringo Starr went on record about this in "The Beatles Anthology" (also via Den of Geek), noting that the Beatles' increased marijuana consumption really messed with production on "Help!" He was very frank about it, adding that one can, if they look closely, see the evidence on screen:

"In one of the scenes, Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear are playing curling: sliding along those big stones. One of the stones has a bomb in it, and we find out that it's going to blow up and have to run away. Well, Paul and I ran about seven miles, we ran and ran, just so we could stop and have a joint before we came back. [...] If you look at pictures of us, you can see a lot of red-eyed shots; they were red from the dope we were smoking."

One wonders if director Sam Mendes' "The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event" will include that detail.