[In] Help!, the most wonderful transformations of reality occur.

Richard Lester's style is one of endless enterprise, of an apparently inexhaustible zaniness that can become wearying by the end. Well-trained in the techniques of his trade by making advertising films, he clearly takes pleasure in all the tricks of focus and exposure, in the strange effects a camera can achieve; and in Help! he has responded with great freshness to the possibilities of colour. Throughout the film, especially during the songs, he has striven to create a visual quality that is as thoughtless and carefree as the singing itself. Everything is light-hearted, everything is played for laughs…. [In] the most inventive sequence of the film, the one shot in the Alps, while we listen to their "She's got a Ticket to Ride" number, we watch bizarre images of them clowning about in the snow, all dressed in black, sometimes perched upon a grand piano isolated in the wilderness with a surrealist absurdity, sometimes skiing and tumbling about with the kind of quick-cutting and trick effects that we associate with the Keystone Cops. But these visual gags, successful though they are, are really imposed upon the music. The kids of all ages throughout the world do not laugh when they are listening to the Beatles. These fans are more moved than that.

For there is about the Beatles a kind of purity of appeal, a winning simplicity of manner, that is in the long run oddly served by all these antics on the screen. It is a characteristic of the film … that it never slows down. It never allows any one image more than a few seconds on the screen. Even the Beatles themselves are not allowed to exist as individuals. Gone is the attempt, granted at least to Ringo in A Hard Day's Night, to permit some sense of their individual personalities to emerge. The camera cuts back and forth from one Beatle to the next as if to guarantee them their collective anonymity….

What is the effect of all this endless running and jumping, this refusal to stand still? Up to a point, it seems an attempt to render in visual terms some of the energy of the Beatles' music; but beyond that point, it would seem to betray a fear that we might perhaps get to know what they are like in some detrimental way, that they might make some kind of appeal different from the interminable androgynous charm which now seems to have been such a large part of their success. For like the characters in The Knack, the Beatles inhabit that no-man's-land of adolescent get-with-it-ness, that formerly awkward age which exists between sexual awareness and sexual experience, but which can now seem such a ball if we bring to it the right kind of style and a determination not-to-be-square….

[Beneath] all the assertive gaiety of this enterprising film, there is a sadness—a sadness that is the result of a lack of trust in how the Beatles really are, and in their ability to create their own effect instead of having everything contrived for them by the techniques of the film. Again like The Knack, like the too-clever advertisement that finally undermines the product it is trying to sell, the film seems to be nudging us too hard, to be urging us too insistently to get-with-it at all costs, to be crazy, cool, superficial and detached…. It is both the excitement and achievement, if at the same time the present limitation of Richard Lester, that he, although American, has so successfully understood this new British modishness and has transferred its surface qualities with such inventiveness to the screen. (p. 200)