MAGNET contributing writer Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 500 titles—from the silent era through the ’90s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.
Help! (1965, 96 minutes)
Hidden deep within an underground cavern before a statue of the beloved eight-armed deity Kaili (this picture was originally titled Eight Arms To Hold You), the sacrifice of a virgin is about to take place. Before the membership of this strange Eastern cult, a chanting Clang (Leo McKern), dressed in golden armor, is about to strike the death blow. “Hold!” shouts out Ahme (Elinor Bron) before the shimmering assegai can be plunged into the girl. “The ring! She’s not wearing the sacrificial ring! She cannot be sacrificed without the ring!” Dazed, Clang removes his helmet and shouts, “Search her!” to his scrambling minions who, of course, find nothing.
Yes, it’s the second feature-length film by the Beatles, again directed by Richard Lester. But this time, it’s in color, as is made perfectly clear by the multi-hued darts being thrown into a movie screen showing a black-and-white film of the Fab Four crooning the movie’s title song. The man flinging the tiny arrows is Clang, furious at the Beatles’ drummer, Ringo Starr, who is now wearing that same sacrificial ring missing from the virgin. Not much more required for a story line than Ringo being hounded world-wide by this loopy cult, from the chilly Swiss Alps to the lush greenery and warm sands of an exotic Caribbean island.
A black limousine pulls up next to four adjoining London flats, each one’s door painted a different color: red, blue, green and white. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo each enters one of the doors, only to reveal that all four dwellings have been hollowed out inside to become one cavernous maxi-flat. “Lovely lads and so natural,” says a middle-aged neighbor lady as the boys wave back. “Still the same as they was before they was,” replies her companion.
John spins around a fake shelf of fake books only to reveal real books on the other side. He chooses his current fave read, a slim volume of his own verse and sketches called A Spaniard In The Works (a play on the cliché “a spanner in the works”; that’s what you’d call a “monkey wrench”). He hops into his sunken bed and begins to read. George asks his gardener to mow the grass, planted where you’d expect a carpet, with a pair of novelty-store fake teeth. Paul plays a music-hall flourish on an electric organ, and Ringo heads for his own personal automat-style sandwich machine.
As he tries to extract a sandwich, Ringo shouts, “Hey, someone’s got ahold of me finger!” He screams in pain when the girl inside tries to bite the famous ring from his famous finger. “She had me finger, y’know,” he says to a disinterested Lennon. Next stop, Scotland Yard to see if something can be done about these miscreants.
