Rating:

I’m not exactly going out on a limb by saying that the Beatles were the greatest band in the history of recorded music. That they should put out such an incredibly diverse and prolific body of music in such a short span of time (their first album hit the shelves in 1963, their last in early 1970) is a remarkable feat unrivaled to this day. In the early phase of their recording career they managed not only to produce all this wonderful music but also to star in two superb examples of pop-music cinema, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). Then, as 1966 gave way to 1967’s summer of love–in many ways, the defining moment of flower-power hippiedom–the world began to radically change and the Beatles changed with it. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” were supplanted by the unabashed psychedelia of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Sgt. Pepper’s. Amid all these new creative experiments and all this artistic growth, the Beatles again found time to make a movie, and this time they weren’t just the stars but the writers and directors, too. Can you imagine the excitement the news of this project must have generated among Beatles fans? The Fab Four are going to be in complete control of a film! This will be awesome!

Well, as it turned out, Magical Mystery Tour wasn’t so much awesome as it was the shittiest thing to have ever happened anywhere. While each of the Beatles was a phenomenal musician and skilled songwriter, apparently none of them knew anything about making movies beyond “I guess there should be images of some kind on the screen.” Whether those images should have any readily apparent meaning or any connection to or bearing on the ones that precede or follow them was irrelevant. “As long as there’s something up there, it counts as a movie” seems to have been the de facto motto.

There’s no real story to follow here. Early on in the picture there is an attempt to justify the title with the Beatles being on a bus tour of the English countryside, but this notion quickly collapses and basically disappears. The movie sort of topples over on itself and becomes little more than a series of random, mostly musical vignettes. I guess in that respect one might compare it to Fantasia, if Fantasia’s segments were meaningless and skull-shatteringly boring and featured a guest appearance by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

The vignettes themselves cover a wide range of styles. As “The Fool on the Hill” plays, we get to watch Paul McCartney doing a gymnastic floor routine off in the country on some hazy English morning. “I am the Walrus” is a straightforward band-playing-a-song type segment–or, rather, as straightforward as people in walrus costumes and weird egg-shaped hats can be. The low-energy instrumental “Flying” is accompanied by lethargic shots of passing landscape rendered in all sorts of bizarre, neon colors as though the Beatles’ tour bus had just arrived at Jupiter and made its way through a Stargate, where it now barrels ahead beyond the infinite.

Of course, the sections of the film that are unaccompanied by soundtrack songs are no less bizarre or unpleasant. Who could ever forget the stirring scene where an army sergeant–played at least on par with George C. Scott’s work in Patton–speaks in rapid, ululating gibberish for several minutes while whacking a statue of a cow with a stick? Or how about the so-called “Magical Mystery Tour Marathon,” where some people run, others ride bicycles, and good ol’ Ringo drives around in circles on a bus? No one has any clear goal, but I guess a winner is declared, if that sort of thing is important to you. There are also a group of magicians (played by the Beatles) who keep showing up and expressing their keen interest in the bus and its passengers. However, these magicians never actually do anything to the people on the tour, so it’s difficult to discern just what purpose they serve. And let’s not forget the movie’s best-remembered sequence (a fact which should tell you a lot): John Lennon, dressed as a waiter, heaping great piles of spaghetti onto Ringo’s aunt’s diner plate with a shovel. And are there midgets? You bet there are! Move over, Citizen Kane; there’s a new champeen in town!

It’s tough to come up with anything really positive to say about this mish-mash. When originally shown on the BBC (thankfully this was a made-for-TV project and those involved were spared what would no doubt have been a disastrous theatrical release), the film was broadcast in black and white and there are those who claim this mistake is what created such an overwhelmingly negative reaction; these people maintain you can’t appreciate the movie’s full trippy impact without all those bright colors. I say nerts to that. Color or black and white, it makes no difference. This movie is nothing but random nonsense regardless of whether you can see the weird design on Paul’s sweater-vest. Paul McCartney himself, who was the movie’s chief supporter during production and the primary creative force behind it, has said in interviews that the best thing Magical Mystery Tour has going for it is that it’s the only place to see a performance of “I am the Walrus.” Sorry, Paul, but that’s not gonna cut it. “I am the Walrus” ain’t exactly “Yesterday,” if you know what I mean. No, the real value in this travesty is that it teaches all of us an invaluable filmmaking lesson: One should never ever give control of a movie over to a group of people who have, sashaying merrily through their bloodstreams, every hallucinogenic chemical in the western hemisphere.

How, then, to summarize? I think the best way would be with the words of the narrator at the film’s alarmingly abrupt conclusion: “That was a magical mystery tour. I told you. Goodbye.”

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• The Truth About Paul McCartney
• Across the Universe
• Psycho
• Movie Review: The Hangover
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