ABSTRACT
Production on the Beatles' second film Help Started on 23 February 1965, again produced by Walter Shenson, with a 'big' budget of £ 400,000 and directed by Richard Lester. Lester uses the performance scenes in the film to build on the work he pioneered in the first feature, with outdoor settings and their 'breaking out' implications replacing the confined indoor spaces of A Hard Day's Night. While the outdoors has provided the backdrop of the most masculine of film genres, the Western, the Western's rugged landscape for rugged men scenario is subverted by the Beatles' feminised and narcissistic appearance. Help Offers a second opportunity to look at and study the 'to-be-looked-at-ness' of the Beatles, and the more feminised visual appearance described. In Help! They are metrosexual before it had been invented. Simpson's twenty-first-century 'discovery' 'the metrosexual' has, it can be argued, its roots firmly in the mid 1960s, and the Beatles in Help Can be read as metrosexual or, perhaps, pre-metrosexual.
