Help!

The Beatles' second film, and Richard Lester going the opposite way from A Hard Day's Night. The first was black and white, documentary-looking and about the group; this is colour, absurd, and something close to a cartoon. The plot concerns a ring on Ringo's finger. A cult needs it for a sacrifice, so the group flees from London to the Alps to the Bahamas. The narrative is loose because its real job is to build settings for the songs. That is where its importance in film history lies: detaching songs from the story and turning them into free-standing visual episodes laid down the template for the music video. The group later said themselves that they were smoking heavily throughout the shoot; Lennon summed the film up years afterwards by saying they were extras in their own picture. George Harrison saw a sitar for the first time on this set, an encounter that led to Norwegian Wood and the band's turn toward Indian music. Who it is for: Beatles listeners and anyone curious about 1960s pop cinema. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story. The script is scattered, and the depiction of the cult rests on a caricature of Indian religion that reads as plainly racist now.