Magical Mystery Tour

 

 After watching something particularly baffling, I will sometimes shake my head and say "That was definitely a movie."  After watching Magical Mystery Tour (1967), though, I'm honesty not so sure.

Here's the thing. In Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the plot is only there to string the songs together.  In Magical Mystery Tour, the plot (such as it is) is mostly there to kill time between songs.  It's really more of a vague premise than a narrative experience, but here is what I can gather.

Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr) and his Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins) book tickets for "The Magical Mystery Tour," a bus trip managed by Jolly Jimmy Johnson (Derek Royle) and Miss Wendy Winters (Miranda Forbes), joined by Buster Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler), who doesn't actually work for the company but seems to like the uniform.  The other Beatles are also passengers; John and George are sitting together and practicing comedy bits, while Paul is flirting with the starlet (Maggie Wright) sitting next to them.  The bus drives from one destination to another, while in a magical high school science lab above the clouds, four or five magicians (the Beatles and their road manager and personal assistant Mal Evans) follow the progress of the bus and use their magical powers to do vague things.  Aunt Jessie is looking for a new husband and has her eye on Bloodvessel, and that's as close as anyone gets to a tangible motivation.

It's definitely a strange and ambling film, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  At its best it's an example of the sort of British surrealist humor that Monty Python would start doing in 1969, and that the future Pythons were already doing on TV shows like At Last the 1948 Show (featuring Graham Chapman and John Cleese, along with Marty Feldman and the lovely Aimi MacDonald) and Do Not Adjust Your Set (featuring Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, along with Denise Coffey and David Jason.  Music provided by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who also perform "Death Cab For Cutie" in Magical Mystery Tour's strip club scene.)  At it's worst the script is incoherent nonsense; nobody changes, nobody learns anything, and Aunt Jessie never manages to land Bloodvessel, at least as far as we can tell.

Of course, people probably watch the movie for the songs.  Whether you like the music or not will depend on whether you like the Beatles, but the songs are presented in a variety of striking visual styles, including the funny animal costumes for "I Am The Walrus," extreme closeups of Paul's eyes for "The Fool on a Hill," and George playing a keyboard drawn with sidewalk chalk for "Blue Jay Way."  Perhaps it's better to think of this as a collection of music videos with bonus sketch comedy bits rather than a movie.

 

The other Beatles tend to blame Paul for Magical Mystery Tour.  This will be important later.