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Lizards in Movies   Help! (1965)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   Discussing lizards in movies is silly, but this one takes the prize for being trivial. It only has a very brief scene filmed in the Bahamas with an accidental lizard appearance. Even though it's just a lizard photobomb, since I'm a big Beatles fan it made me think of John Lennon's enigmatic lyrics about "a lizard on a window pane." Help! is the second movie directed by Richard Lester starring The Beatles, following A Hard Day's Night in 1964. It deals with a murderous Eastern cult and a mad scientist trying to abduct Ringo because he is wearing a sacrificial ring that he can't remove. Chased by bad guys, the Beatles flee to the Bahamas. Near the end of the movie we seen the Fab Four riding on bicycles searching for someone. They leave their bicycles and follow a trail of footsteps made with red paint that too-conveniently lead them to an old green building. At approximately 1:17:50, when George Harrison pulls himself up to look through a window pane, we see a small lizard crawling from near his right foot up the wall between him and John Lennon, stopping above John. The lizard is not easy to see so I have put a red circle around it in the screenshots. It appears that John notices the lizard and raises his head up to watch it as it crawls above him. Then he returns his gaze to George, who jumps down from the window as the lizard keeps crawling up the wall. We don't get a close look at it, but I think the lizard might be one of the species of small anole lizards that are found in the Caribbean. I doubt it was supposed to be in the shot, but either the director didn't mind that John was temporarily distracted by it, or he didn't notice it. Help! was filmed in the Bahamas in 1965 and released later that year. Three years later, in 1968, the Beatles released The White Album which includes the song "Happiness is a Warm Gun," written by John Lennon (credited to Lennon-McCartney) which is full of references to sex and drugs along with more obscure poetic lyrics. It also includes a line about velvet gloves and a lizard: "She's well-acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand, Like a lizard on a window pane." The Help! lizard was not on a window pane, but the scene still makes me wonder if John remembered it in the back of his head when he wrote the song. The Beatles Bible discusses the song, with a mention of the lizard lyric: "The first section of the song was made up of phrases thought up by Lennon and Apple’s publicist Derek Taylor during an acid trip the pair experienced along with Neil Aspinall and Lennon’s childhood friend Pete Shotton." "The lizard on the window pane was a recollection from Taylor's days living in Los Angeles." This probably means that Taylor told the author he once saw a lizard on a window pane in Los Angeles, and told John about it. But the only lizards inhabiting L.A. in those days (before glass-climbing Geckos invaded the state in the 2000s) were not adept at walking on glass windows, so I suspect Taylor was confused about where he saw the lizard. Maybe he saw a gecko on glass in some other place. But whatever he saw, he believes that his comment to John inspired the line. "Window pane" was also slang for LSD sold in little square sheets, so maybe the phrase is another drug reference. Was the lizard tripping on LSD?