Solid

Rating: 5/10 (21 June 2012)

It was many years ago that I first saw the Beatles' 1964 debut black and white film, A Hard Day's Night, on PBS. It had to have been during the 1980s, possibly during a pledge drive. Given that I was not a Beatles fan growing up, I didn't think much of the film, however, perhaps this was my bias, the wan rift of memory, plus the fact that I have become a much more acute critic of all things, including cinema, clouding my memory. Then, a couple of years ago I watched the band's second film Help! It, too, was not a good film. In fact, it was quite a bad film. However, most critics state that the second film was not as good as the first, and this includes Roger Ebert and virtually every other online critic for, according to Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 100% rating in terms of favorability.
Yet, the truth is, if Help! is, as I describe it, a 'bad' film, its 87 minute long predecessor is a flat out terrible film. That anyone would find this appallingly poorly executed, unfunny, hodgepodge of ill acted swill remotely entertaining is a testament to the depths human enjoyment can plunge. Yes, the songs from the bands' early era are good, but there isn't a single joke told in this film that garners even a mild teehee. That some critics suggest this film is equal to the great classic comedies of the Marx Brothers shows how addled some minds truly are. While it's true that, as Ebert suggests, this film had a profound influence on the music video industry that arose in the 1980s, it's had a negligible impact on film, itself. Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, and Ingmar Bergman, among others, were already far more visually sophisticated and daring than anything director Richard Lester tossed into this film, along with cinematographer Gilbert Taylor. In fact, despite Ebert's claims that the film is 'strikingly original,' the very opposite is true- it is derivative to the core (think Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers, the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, the Bowery Boys- need I continue?); so, unless one wants to claim that being almost wholly and shamelessly derivative is perversely a 'strikingly original' thing to be, Ebert's statement is doomed to go down as one of the greatest examples of his tendency to cinematically brain fart. The screenplay, by Alun Owen, is simply abominable. The film consists solely of songs with a few poor comic tidbits in between. These tidbits consist of the boys running away from female fans, engaging in pseudo-blue banter with Paul McCartney's supposed 'other' grandfather, a man who seemingly undermines and embarrasses the boys at every opportunity, and arguing over petty matters with their band manager. The film ends with the boys titillating a television studio full of screaming young females.
Several things are apparent in this film: 1) it was designed merely as a moneymaking venture for, despite the brain dead criticism this film is utterly void of any real art, 2) the Beatles simply cannot act and their films, it seems, started their later slide into musical pretension, and 3) the Monkees'- television's Prefab 4 response to Beatlemania were almost infinitely better actors. In fact, their acting range was probably farther beyond the Beatles' than the Beatles' actual musical canon was above theirs, for the Monkees actually were good at improv; the Beatles weren't. And, the film is actually at its best during seeming improves. The clearly scripted moments, which seem less like even a first draft but a first premise, and which have the boys interacting with real actors is excruciatingly painful to watch and hear, as jokes that are decades old, even then, are told with a manic glee that somehow, if a teen heartthrob tells them they will magically regain their humor. One wonders why both of the band's first two films are so poorly made and the answer is rather obvious: producers rushed them through production for fear that the Beatles' popularity would fade and that the Rolling Stones, or some yet discovered group would make them passÃ© before the films were released.
The real test of the film's cinematic worth, however, comes from a simple test: if the film had been on a fictive band, made up of actors, singing Beatles songs, would the critics have trumpeted it so? Of course not. Furthermore, they would have used the films of many of the predecessor comedy teams I mentioned as proof of just how derivative this film is. However, this film's cardinal sin is not its pretension, but, aside from its poor technical quality, simply how dull and unfunny it is.