Magical Mystery Tour...a look back

[Kooperman]

"We Thought People Would Understand" - Paul

Beatles film comes out "nonsense"

Magical Mystery Tour, the long-awaited home movie by the Beatles, was seen by twenty two million people in England on December 26. The popular British papers described the 50-minute film as "Chaotic, appalling, naive, puffle, flop, tasteless, contemptuous, nonsense."

"It was a mistake," Paul McCartney said, replying to the hostile criticism of the movie, "because we thought people would understand that it was 'magical' and a 'mystery tour.'"

Paul Fox, head of BBC 1, which aired the film, said that he agreed it wasn't the easiest film to understand. "I saw it four times and I began to understand it," Fox noted.

The film critic of The London Times wrote: "This was a program to experience rather than to understand. I was unfortunate; I lacked the necessary key."

A front page review in the Daily Express began, "The harder they come, the harder they fall . . . I cannot ever remember seeing such blatant rubbish."

And Paul McCartnev continued, "We thought the title was explanation enough. There was no plot and it was formless. Deliberately so. We enjoy fantasy and were trying to creat this.

"Perhaps we should have had someone saying: 'We are going magical now folks,' We did not, and the trouble is if people don't understand, they say, 'A load of old rubbish,' and switch off."

Now there are lots of resentful and ill-tempered people around who want to bring the Beatles down to their debilitating world. And then there are lots of well-meaning persons who need connections and spotlights every second to show them where they are, in art as well as life, and what they're seeing.

It's not that the Beatles' film is formless or pointless and therefore "meaningless": people who criticize in these terms say the same things about films like Muriel, Persona, Barrier. Quite simply, its rather that there are too few lovely or "magical" moments in Magical Mystery Tour.

One of them is Paul singing "The Fool on the Hill" as we see him in the distance, head hunched, pacing on the hill's edge in his Edwardian coat. Then there is, not Paul's granddad, but Ringo's charming fat Aunt Jessie, continually badgering her nephew in the bus -- "Stop being so hystorical!" she admonishes Ringo -- or watching enjoyably as piles of sloppy pasta are dumped in front of her at a mammoth luncheon.

The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band almost steals the film, as George and a leering John watch a stripper dancing to Mike Quinn's and the Bonzo's fantastic parody of the Elvis-Gene Vincent '50's singing and stage style. And the four Beatles, dressed in white tuxedoes, make a wonderfully stylized entrance down richly carpeted stairways, '40's musical style, as dancers surround them in the song "Your Mother Should Know."

The visual ideas of the wonderful "I Am a Walrus" are literal -- there are lots of egg men and a walrus, but the film tries to move the way the song moves, so that one finds a silly one-to-one relationship between the juxtaposing of sections in the song and the editing of the filmed scene. (The song itself has been banned by the BBC's pop radio station because of the line about the girl pulling down her knickers.)

"Blue Jay May" shows George in meditation posture, his body refracted as through a prism -- a series of astral bodies in space, but the effect doesn't hold, and lots of unattractive visual objects break indulgently into the scene. One critic calls the bus travelers a "motley collection of uncouth and unlikable trippers," but it's not that they're unlikeable. Rather its that they try too hard to amuse. As so-called comedian Nat Jackley, who played Nat the Rubber Man, said about the film: "I thought it shocking. I couldn't make head or tail of it. All my comedy stuff, lasting twenty minutes, was cut up." And just as well. For Nat -- like the bus race, the field games, Victor Spinetti's drill sergeant hysterics, doesn't come off. The film depends, as Nat depends, on dead-end slapstick, unsurprising "Goon Show" humor.

Technically, the film uses too many histrionic jump cuts and the usual and expected fast-slow motion shots. These are weak effects because they only produce a veneer of action and gaiety -- the Beatles haven't developed their editing ideas in the ways that Stan Brackhage and Bruce Connor have, if they want that kind of energy.

The musical score hardly helps the visual infelicities, yet there beautiful things in the music as usual.

The criticisms of Magical Mystery Tour were as bitter, ignorant, and demented as any I've seen. BBC paid ten thousand pounds for the film (it cost £30,000 to make), and a U.S. network is paying a million dollars for broadcasting rights. But as Paul said:

"Our problem so that we are prisoners of our own fame. We could put on a mop-top show. But we don't really like that sort of entertainment any more. And we don't work for the bread now.

"We will make another film. And we won't employ choreographers, directors and the rest. We will make it ourselves. We learned a lot. It was not such a bad thing that we were slated. It still leaves us a challenge.

"But was the film really so bad compared with the rest of the Christmas TV? . . . You could hardly call the Queen's speech a gasser."

Source: Rolling Stone magazine Feb. 10, 1968

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsartic...id=17406&cf=317

[DudeAsInCool]

If you look at Magical Mystery Tour as a series of music videos ( the Beatles pretty much invented the form) for TV then the thing sorta works in segments. At least they had the Magical Tour idea as a concept...most music videos never have any theme at all

A Hard Days Night and Yellow Submarine still hold up as films today

[Kooperman]

the Magical Mystery Tour film holds up today as a curiosity, a vivid testament to the excesses of the decade and also to McCartney's restlessness to create, even though he was out of his element in film.

The movie Help! also holds up as campy fun, although storywise and cinematically it's miles behind Hard Days Night...it seems more like an overstuffed television movie to me.

[DudeAsInCool]

Ive just noticed that a lot of the ads are working in synconicity. There are Beatles music ads above as I post this. Clearly Google must be sending info back for those ads to register above. How does that work?

[Kooperman]

Right, I've noticed that synchronicity also....made me wonder what thread you were in when you saw the one you mentioned to Shawn this morning elsewhere.

[Shawn]

That is supposed to be the value of google ads. It's only supposed to show relevant ads. It looks at what a particular thread mentions (keywords), and then serves those ads.

Only the merciful Lord who art above knows how we were saintly blessed with so many church ads. ;)

[DudeAsInCool]

Kooper - I think the 'removal of public hair' must have come up when I was looking at the BK Thug Thread which contained the indecent exposure of your ass...

And Shawn, the reason we are blessed with so many church ads, is because Beatking is the last refuge for God's Children. Amen. B)

[slum_goddess]

the reason we are blessed with so many church ads, is because Beatking is the last refuge for God's Children.  Amen.  B)

i'd say it's cause sg's in the house (a venereal presleyterian from the tabernacle of st elvis the divine UK. (nb: alabama 3 church slogan and don't take it literally--we're not into elvis).