It's probably fair to say that if A Hard Day's Night set the stage for Python, then Help! helped enable the Monkees. In A Hard Day's Night the monochromatic four jumped in squares and jumped on squares - except Wilfrid Brambell, who effortlessly managed to be more radical than any of the Fabs - in fields and jumpcuts which Richard Lester had remembered from The Running, Jumping And Standing Still Film four years earlier. A brief entertainment principally involving Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Leo McKern, it reaches into the Victorian roots of the British notion of surrealism and demands that nothing means everything. It has no logic and no real plot and yet is endlessly watchable and dreamable. And the players do little except go happily mad in a field.
Help!, however, was in colour, and its perceived strained playfulness actually fit the 1965 Beatles glove. It played on BBC2 a couple of Saturdays ago and I was struck by how perceptive it was of the factors which would ultimately seal the group's doom; pursued by madmen and ambulance chasers around the world for presumed violation of a sacred trinket, prisoners in the Alps as much as in the Bahamas, free only in their gigantic playroom dressed up as an ordinary street in Chiswick. The Monkees too lived in what appeared to be oversized playpen with intimations of student lodgings (there is a significant overlap) and their programme's plots tended towards the equally silly or gloriously non-existent; like the Beatles of Help!, they tend to burst into song at random, whenever they feel like it, regardless of plot development or its lack - their determined nonsense defies the grey logic of those who would do away with them.
The screening also helped remind me of the casual-looking but highly polished brilliance of the corps of British comedy character actors, most of whom made an appearance - Victor Spinetti, Roy Kinnear, Patrick Cargill, John Bluthal, Eleanor Bron (why did pink leather never catch on?) as well as McKern - rep reliables all but nowhere do they threaten to overwhelm the Beatles' blissed out, stoned indifference. The involvement of McKern here is crucial; the key worm who finally has no option but to turn in The Prisoner, the 19th century would-be astronomer gazing through the wrong end of Sellers' telescope, he assumes many guises in the course of Help! and stamps his petulant authority on all of them. And the Beatles' amused cat and mouse games with McKern's Clang aren't that far removed from the mental chess in which McGoohan and McKern indulge in the Village; small talk, every syllable of which implies a planet filled with implications, exchanged conspiratorial smiles out of direct camera shot - this Number Two does not seem to be anybody's idea of a cold rationalist bureaucrat.
And both finally explode into violent anti-meaning to displace gravity with play; Help! ends with the assorted villains and nincompoops playing pass the parcel with the ring and the sand, The Prisoner climaxes with the van roaring up the A2 towards London, McKern tangoing away madly to "Dem Bones." And in Head, the Monkees will jump off that bridge and float downstream, but of course they are indestructible - Number 1 as an irritating piece of dandruff in Victor Mature's scalp.
In this context, "She's A Woman" seems one of the most playful things the Beatles ever recorded; originally appearing as the B-side to "I Feel Fine," it finds McCartney making an early rendezvous with reggae and delving into the concept and meaning of the word and being "woman" but not solemnly (as if! "I know that she's no peasant!!"). They swing, shuffle and blur; Doug Sahm got a hit out of its slipstream ("She's About A Mover" is essentially "She's A Woman" crossed with "What'd I Say?" and a little Tex-Mex) and Green Gartside, together with Shabba Ranks and the B.E.F., would pay due acknowledgement to its forming of him with his 1991 cover. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the film, they're in the Alps, in need of no help and obliviously happy; Lennon ominously grinning to camera as he leans over the top of the piano, picking at the keys backwards, defying gravity, too busy singing to put anybody down.
Help!, however, was in colour, and its perceived strained playfulness actually fit the 1965 Beatles glove. It played on BBC2 a couple of Saturdays ago and I was struck by how perceptive it was of the factors which would ultimately seal the group's doom; pursued by madmen and ambulance chasers around the world for presumed violation of a sacred trinket, prisoners in the Alps as much as in the Bahamas, free only in their gigantic playroom dressed up as an ordinary street in Chiswick. The Monkees too lived in what appeared to be oversized playpen with intimations of student lodgings (there is a significant overlap) and their programme's plots tended towards the equally silly or gloriously non-existent; like the Beatles of Help!, they tend to burst into song at random, whenever they feel like it, regardless of plot development or its lack - their determined nonsense defies the grey logic of those who would do away with them.
The screening also helped remind me of the casual-looking but highly polished brilliance of the corps of British comedy character actors, most of whom made an appearance - Victor Spinetti, Roy Kinnear, Patrick Cargill, John Bluthal, Eleanor Bron (why did pink leather never catch on?) as well as McKern - rep reliables all but nowhere do they threaten to overwhelm the Beatles' blissed out, stoned indifference. The involvement of McKern here is crucial; the key worm who finally has no option but to turn in The Prisoner, the 19th century would-be astronomer gazing through the wrong end of Sellers' telescope, he assumes many guises in the course of Help! and stamps his petulant authority on all of them. And the Beatles' amused cat and mouse games with McKern's Clang aren't that far removed from the mental chess in which McGoohan and McKern indulge in the Village; small talk, every syllable of which implies a planet filled with implications, exchanged conspiratorial smiles out of direct camera shot - this Number Two does not seem to be anybody's idea of a cold rationalist bureaucrat.
And both finally explode into violent anti-meaning to displace gravity with play; Help! ends with the assorted villains and nincompoops playing pass the parcel with the ring and the sand, The Prisoner climaxes with the van roaring up the A2 towards London, McKern tangoing away madly to "Dem Bones." And in Head, the Monkees will jump off that bridge and float downstream, but of course they are indestructible - Number 1 as an irritating piece of dandruff in Victor Mature's scalp.
In this context, "She's A Woman" seems one of the most playful things the Beatles ever recorded; originally appearing as the B-side to "I Feel Fine," it finds McCartney making an early rendezvous with reggae and delving into the concept and meaning of the word and being "woman" but not solemnly (as if! "I know that she's no peasant!!"). They swing, shuffle and blur; Doug Sahm got a hit out of its slipstream ("She's About A Mover" is essentially "She's A Woman" crossed with "What'd I Say?" and a little Tex-Mex) and Green Gartside, together with Shabba Ranks and the B.E.F., would pay due acknowledgement to its forming of him with his 1991 cover. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the film, they're in the Alps, in need of no help and obliviously happy; Lennon ominously grinning to camera as he leans over the top of the piano, picking at the keys backwards, defying gravity, too busy singing to put anybody down.
