The Beatles (1967)

The Beatles wrote the script, such as it is, and directed with the help of the well-known cinematographer Bernard Knowles – although the cinematography credit went to Richard Starkey, MBE.  Magical Mystery Tour was panned when it was first shown on BBC television on Boxing Day 1967:  as George Martin has said, it didn’t help that everyone was watching on black and white sets a film made in colour – and surely sometimes bewildering in monochrome.  The film is a shambles beyond its intentional discursiveness:   a car/coach chase/race goes on way too long; there are plenty of crap comedy bits; the end arrives abruptly with the framing idea of the coach trip more or less forgotten about.  It can’t be said either that time has been kind to Magical Mystery Tour:  it has an historical interest now but this is not an instance of a film that was underrated on its first appearance because it was so original.    Even so, the film might have been worse in cinematically professional hands.  The combination of amateurishness and the Beatles’ self-indulgent mucking about turns it into a kind of peculiar home movie.

It’s striking that arguably the most accomplished comic actor in the cast, Victor Spinetti, is also the unfunniest (as an incomprehensibly verbose sergeant major); that Nat Jackley, the reason for that ‘arguably’, doesn’t register; and that Paul McCartney’s shallow competence makes him the least interesting presence among the Beatles – even though George seems very uncomfortable, especially dancing to ‘Your Mother Should Know’.   There are some funny and enjoyable things – John’s voiceover narration, the verbal argy-bargy between Ringo (the most natural actor of the four) and his Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins, who’s full-bodied in every way), Ivor Cutler’s ominous and emaciated Mr (Buster) Bloodvessel, the coach party singing together.  A sequence featuring the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and a Paul Raymond Revuebar stripper (Jan Carson) on stage together doesn’t work – the song is dull, the routine merely tacky, and there’s no connection (or comic disconnection) between the two performing elements.  On the other hand, the blindfolded vicars and tug-of-war dwarves do come over as surreal; and mixing up the psychedelic with the forced enjoyment of a coach party is oddly appealing.  There are also, of course, the songs.  It’s hard to complain when you get the title track, ‘Fool on the Hill’, ‘Your Mother Should Know’ and, especially, ‘I Am the Walrus’ in the course of fifty minutes.

18 April 2013