The Missing Scene From Help!

English actress Wendy Richard

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of both the album and film Help! we remember one deleted scene that was actually featured on the 2007 digitally remastered DVD of the said film.Added on the second disc as a 'bonus feature',English actress Wendy Richard remembers as she describes on how thrilled she was working with the world's greatest rock band.

Story goes that Wendy portrays a student at a drama school wittily christened Sam Ahab's School Of Transcendental Elocution. Sam Ahab,was actually an anagram of Bahamas spelled backwards.The said fictionized character was played by comedian Frank Howerd who director Richard Lester describes as being kind of nervous working with the band.Lady Macbeth which was the character Richard was portraying was practicing her drama skills which Beatle George find it very irritating that he took some earplugs so he wont be able to hear it.Happens that Clang,portrayed by Australian actor Leo McKern has plotted his army of thugs to play some kind of a hypnotic music that actually put everyone spellbound.Enter Clang and the thugs they eventually got a hold of Ringo and tried to pull out the ring from his finger.When that option failed they eventually switched to plan B which is to cut Ringo's hand using a hatchet.Unknown to everyone,George wasn't affected by the hypnotic chant for wearing those earplugs earlier that he actually confronted Clang and his minions.Took them a while and then the spell started to wear off that others soon woke up from such hypnosis.Clang soon saw the failure in his plan that he decided to abort and fled along with Ahme(portrayed by Eleanor Bron) and his two other thugs.

In an interview included in the bonus feature,Richard described on how heartbroken she was when she was told that the whole scene was removed but was glad anyway that she was given a copy of the photos that was taken from the scene.Lester later pointed out that the scene didn't actually turned out to suit the movie itself that they decided to remove it in the editing blade.Sadly,Wendy Richard passed away two years later in 2009 at age 65.Frank Howerd,however, passed away in 1992.

Frank Howerd(center) with the Beatles

Three of us:Howerd and Richard with Paul McCartney  

(c)Keith Vernon Adagio