The Madness of Fab 4 film Help!, through the memories of the protagonists

By editorial board on January 22, 2024

They smoked weed on the plane to the Bahamas and splashed in their hotel pool fully clothed.

They enjoyed themselves in Austria singing their hearts out on the ski slopes, barely knowing which way to hold their poles. In 1965 they were the biggest band in the world: this is the Beatles on the set of Help!, the film by Dick Lester. The Fab Four's second cinematic foray, which was filmed 55 years ago, remained long in the shadow of the previous year's debut, A Hard Day's Night, although both films were directed by the same director.

The Beatles, who had signed a three-picture deal with United Artists, had originally sought an adaptation of Richard Condon's surrealist western A Talent for Loving as their second feature film; but it didn't happen that way. "We didn't just want The Beatles to play a color version of A Hard Day's Night," Lester said in 2013. "But we also couldn't show them in their private life, which would have been the next logical extension."

With a larger budget at his disposal, thanks to the success of the first film, Lester was able to use color film and explore distant locations. With the entire world as a potential film set, filming began in the Bahamas on February 23, 1965. The Beatles wanted to use the project as an excuse for an exotic vacation around the world, so the Caribbean was chosen.

But while the band had been expecting a fortnight in paradise, they were in for a rude awakening when they landed on New Providence Island.

The shooting days began at 8.30 in the morning and ended at 17.30; and the islands were colder than they expected. What's more, they encountered shocking poverty around them.

A location used in the film was actually a hospital for the disabled and the elderly. Despite this, Beatlesmania had also reached this remote part of the world, so much so that, while the sequence of Another Girl was being filmed in the backwash of Balmoral Island, a temporary dressing room was built on the beach, made of towels for changing wet clothes, which was literally overrun by fans.

The band's solution was to shoot the film in what they would later describe as a 'marijuana haze'. "Help! started, when we switched to marijuana and alcohol. I've always needed a drug to survive.

Others too, but I've always had more pills, more than everyone, because I'm probably crazier," he said. declared Lennon years after the film's release. "If you look at our photos, you'll notice the red eyes we have in many of the shots. They were red from the dope we smoked," confirmed Ringo Starr in the 1995 serial documentary, Anthology."

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