The Beatles'Help!: Pop Art and the Perils of Parody

Abstract

The Beatles’ first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964), was a huge, international success – commercially and critically. A regular recipient of academic exegeses (Neaverson 1997; Agajanian 2000; Rolston and Murray 2001; Glynn 2004; Donnelly 2007; Williams 2008) and voted at number 88 in the ‘BFI Top 100’ of culturally significant films, it has rather overshadowed the group’s subsequent ventures into celluloid. Neaverson’s study has long constituted the sole academic treatment of later Beatles’ films, but interest and appreciation are belatedly growing for the group’s sophomore effort of 1965, Help!, again directed by Lester. No less an authority than Martin Scorsese has noted that

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