In August 1966, days after the release of Revolver, the Beatles made an astonishing announcement - their upcoming world tour would be their last, as the band planned to focus more on studio recording. This was attributed to the fact that the band members felt the concerts were no longer about their music. Another far smaller factor played into the decision - the band's music was evolving. Revolver employed complex techniques, such as backmasking and Indian musical influences, that couldn't be easily replicated on stage. Whatever the cause, the results were clear: the Beatles weren't who they used to be.
In the time after their retirement from public appearances, the Beatles buckled down on their music and recorded the magnum opus commonly known as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. However, the Beatles also recognized that they'd need some sort of way to stay in the public eye without touring. Television immediately came to mind - after all, the Beatles had made waves with their appearance on Our World, the first TV special internationally broadcast via satellite. Instead of approaching previous Beatles collaborator Richard Lester to helm the made-for-TV film, the band chose to write and direct the special themselves. The results were disastrous - Magical Mystery Tour, released on December 26, 1967, was almost universally panned, and still bears a negative stigma to this day.
Magical Mystery Tour marked a brand-new cinematic frontier for the Beatles - the world of independent film. The "indie" movement as we now know it took hold sometime after World War II, when a decrease in the price of portable cameras made it possible for anyone to make a movie without studio support. The independent movement soon gained a reputation for avant-garde and often taboo-breaking works, as the lack of a studio meant the lack of any production restrictions. Artists like Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol began to experiment with cinematic form and structure, giving rise to a new wave of global auteurs. Though films like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy would eventually fuse indie techniques with Hollywood style, the independent movement in 1967 was still largely composed of experimental works - seemingly a perfect match for the musically curious Beatles.
For years, the Beatles searched for the perfect filmmaker to shape their project. Both British playwright Joe Orton and Patrick McGoohan, the star of the groundbreaking TV series The Prisoner, were considered but rejected. Finally, the band decided on an unlikely set of auteurs - themselves. This concept is often attributed to Paul McCartney, who had developed an interest in home movies after the Beatles retired from touring. McCartney soon reached the point where he owned his own editing machine and often created his own soundtracks for his short films. Inspired by this, the Beatles decided on a whim to create their own movie.
Magical Mystery Tour didn't have a script - at least, not a traditional one. The film was guided by an outline, with which actors would improvise their own dialogue and actions within the given situation. It's an idea somewhat reminiscent of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's preferred style, but with one major difference - while Kiarostami kept his outlines to at least a page, the Beatles's outline was reportedly almost twenty-five pages long. Even the structure itself was rather scant - according to Ringo Starr, a large amount of the scenes were written on the fly and had little material linking them to one another. As a result, Magical Mystery Tour completed production with a whopping ten hours of separate scenes, vignettes, and musical numbers.
The production of Magical Mystery Tour was almost as off-the-cuff and chaotic as its outline. Some of the more experienced actors the Beatles hired were annoyed because of the lack of a script. The cameramen were largely inexperienced: for example, they often forgot to stop shooting while they were walking to the next location, leading to hours of footage of pavement and feet. The cameramen also forgot to get any actual footage of the tour bus, leading to hurried shooting during post-production. Even the Beatles themselves often confessed they had no idea what they were doing. The most notorious incident of all came when other drivers noticed the brightly-colored tour bus and decided to follow it, leading to a chain of cars trailing the bus. Reportedly, John Lennon was so angry that he tore the hand-drawn posters and lettering off the side of the bus at the end of the shoot. Despite high stress levels, the Beatles managed to survive the shoot for Magical Mystery Tour - but could they survive the critics?
Magical Mystery Tour isn't a completely non-narrative film - there's a plot, or at least a loose one. The story follows a series of passengers on a British sightseeing tour, most notably Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr, acting under his birth name), his widowed Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins), and the mysterious Buster Bloodvessel (played by Scottish poet and witticist Ivor Cutler). As the tour drags on, a group of "four or five magicians" (the Beatles and their road manager Mal Evans) decide to have some fun with the passengers on the tour. Aunt Jessie begins to fall in love with Buster Bloodvessel, while the latter begins to act strangely. Very little of this actually matters, however - Magical Mystery Tour is less of a film than it is a sketch show in the tradition of Monty Python, in which the passengers on the tour participate in musical numbers and oddball comedy routines.
1967, the year of Magical Mystery Tour's release, marked a major watershed moment for the burgeoning global counterculture in the form of the Summer of Love. Given the Beatles's associations with the movement, it isn't surprising that Magical Mystery Tour's vignettes often express counterculture ideals. For example, a massive majority of hippies opposed the Vietnam War and the idea of war in general. These anti-military sentiments are expressed by the Beatles early in the film when the tour bus makes a stop at a military office. In a Python-esque comedic gambit, the general running the office (played by Victor Spinetti, a veteran of A Hard Day's Night and Help!) is constantly babbling in energetic gibberish as he seemingly instructs the tourists about how to attack a stuffed cow. The scene exemplifies the counter-culture belief that war is an absurd concept, a belief that the Beatles themselves professed in songs such as "All You Need Is Love" and "Revolution".
Another key conceit of the counter-culture that Magical Mystery Tour embodies is the idea of transcendentalism. Transcendentalism, a concept pioneered by legendary American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, is a philosophy centered around accessing the spiritual through a greater knowledge of the personal. Transcendentalists typically follow Eastern religious techniques, utilizing meditation to make peace with themselves and with nature. In Magical Mystery Tour, these Eastern themes manifest in the form of the mysterious wizards who manipulate the people on the tour. These characters, ostensibly the "gods" of the movie, bear little to no resemblance to Western gods - they exist as separate identities rather than one single deity, and they seem to enjoy playing with the humans below. Furthermore, the film's structure is (perhaps accidentally) built on the transcendentalist belief that societal traditions and structures restrict the purity of the individual - one can only become pure by removing said traditions and structures. Perhaps Magical Mystery Tour represents the Beatles at their most pure: by removing themselves from any known structures, the band members become able to express their identities.
In many Eastern religions, dreams and dreamstates play a key part in transcendence. Dreams are the projections of the subconscious parts of our brains - it only seems right that understanding them would lead to a greater understanding of the self. The Beatles believed in this to some extent: thus, when John Lennon recounted an odd dream he'd had once, they decided to incorporate it into the movie. The resulting sequence is perhaps the strangest part of the movie, as the goofball slapstick of the previous scenes is shoved to the side in order to make way for Bunuel-esque surrealism. The scene seems straightforward enough when described - Ringo's aunt and Buster Bloodvessel bicker at dinner together - but the oddball setting and touches are what drives the scene into hypnotically weird territory. Take, for example, the stuffed cow hanging above the diners in the restaurant, or the overenthusiastic waiter (played by Lennon) serving spaghetti with a shovel and bucket. The sequence isn't quite as brilliantly out-there as something like Un Chien Andalou, but it's just strange enough to be memorable (as well as to serve as a taste of the oddness to come in Yellow Submarine).
These sequences, however, aren't the main attraction of Magical Mystery Tour - that honor belongs to the musical scenes. Judging by the visual quality of the numbers, the Beatles were paying attention during A Hard Day's Night and Help! The numbers, while not as visually polished as those of the previous Beatles movies, have the rhythmic editing style and time-defying juxtaposition that Richard Lester popularized as the "music video" aesthetic. This style is best exemplified by the film's most well-known scene: the Beatles's performance of "I Am The Walrus". The sequence fuses largely incongruous images - i.e. masked musicians, egg-headed choruses, and policemen atop a concrete wall - together using the beats of the song as markers for the cuts. These sudden changes between shots noticeably accent the music, allowing the audience to "feel" the rhythm through visuals as well as audio. Editing also corresponds to movements in the song - as "I Am The Walrus" crescendos during its chorus, the edits become quicker to match the musical buildup. In addition, the images during the song's bridge employ longer shots and calm fades instead of energetic jump-cuts. Overall, the sequence proves to be a great example of how to seamlessly blend image and sound into one inextricable unit.
Curiously enough, the film's final two numbers have very little to do with this style. Even curiouser is that only one of them is by the Beatles. The film's penultimate song, "Death Cab for Cutie" (and yes, that is where the modern alternative band got their name from), is performed by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a British band known for oddball comedy-rock songs like "The Intro and the Outro" and "I'm the Urban Spaceman". Given the band's penchant for avant-garde humor - singer/songwriter Neil Innes frequently collaborated with the members of Monty Python - it's no surprise that the Beatles approached them to perform a campy Elvis parody in a sleazy nightclub. Though the song seems a little out-of-place in the overall film, it doesn't even hold a candle to the bizarre climactic selection of "Your Mother Should Know". Instead of being visualized through a cheaply-shot barrage of quick edits, the final song is presented as a full-blown Busby Berkeley-style musical number complete with tuxedo-clad Beatles descending a massive staircase into a crowd of twirling extras. The song feels like a shock to the system when compared to the film's other musical scenes - editing is minimal at best, the set design is opulent and glitzy, and the dancing is heavily choreographed. It seems to embody the attitude that the Beatles had towards the film - "whatever it is, we'll do it".
The initial reaction to Magical Mystery Tour was notoriously negative, with critics calling the film "pretentious" and "overblown". Part of the reaction was attributed to the broadcast format - the color film was shown on BBC in black-and-white, severely depreciating the film's surreal imagery. The Beatles themselves didn't make much of the bad reviews - to them, the film was more an elaborate home movie than a major production. Over time, though, Magical Mystery Tour has gained a substantial cult following - Steven Spielberg was supposedly a fan of the film during college, and the members of Monty Python wanted to show the film as a double-bill with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Ultimately, Magical Mystery Tour works better as a portrait of the time it came out in than an actual film. Though it may be a little disjointed and dated, it's still an interesting example of counter-culture attitudes and morality during the 1960s. It's also the last narrative film where the Beatles were heavily involved in the production - but that doesn't mean it was the last Beatles movie...
Next time: the Beatles retrospective concludes with a voyage aboard the Yellow Submarine.
Sources:
The Beatles anthology (2000). San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books.
American independent cinema (n.d.). In Oxford Bibliographies. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0061.xml.
Lennon, J. (Producer), & McCartney, P. (Director). (1967). Magical mystery tour [Motion picture]. England: Apple Films.
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