Magical Mystery Tour is a 52-minute-long British surreal comedy television film starring the Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) which originally aired on BBC1 on Boxing Day, 26 December 1967, in a monochrome transmission at 8:35 PM. It was repeated in a colour transmission on BBC2 on 5 January 1968. Upon its initial showing, the film was poorly received by critics and audiences. The film received an American theatrical release in 1974 by New Line Cinema, and in select theatres worldwide in 2012 by Apple Films.
Magical Mystery Tour | |
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The 1988 VHS release cover art | |
Written by | John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr |
Directed by | John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr Bernard Knowles (uncredited) |
Starring | John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr Jessie Robins Vivian Stanshall Mal Evans Ivor Cutler Derek Royle Angelo Muscat Victor Spinetti Miranda Forbes |
Narrated by | John Lennon |
Composer(s) | The Beatles Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band Shirley Evans (accordionist) |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Original language(s) | English |
Production | |
Producer(s) | John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr Gavrik Losey Dennis O'Dell |
Cinematography | Daniel Lacambre Richard Starkey M.B.E. |
Editor(s) | Roy Benson |
Running time | 52 minutes |
Production company(s) | Apple Corps BBC |
Distributor | New Line Cinema (US original release) Apple Films (All current releases) |
Release | |
Original network | BBC1 |
Original release | 26 December 1967 |
Screenplay
The situation is that of a group of people on a British mystery tour in a 1967 coach, focusing mostly on Mr Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr) and his recently widowed Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins). Other group members on the bus include the tour director, Jolly Jimmy Johnson (Derek Royle); the tour hostess, Miss Wendy Winters (Miranda Forbes, credited as Mandy Weet); the conductor, Buster Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler); and the other Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison).
During the course of the tour, "strange things begin to happen" at the whim of "four or five magicians", four of whom are played by the Beatles themselves and the fifth by the band's long-time road manager Mal Evans.
During the journey, Starkey and his Aunt Jessie argue continually. Aunt Jessie begins to have daydreams of falling in love with Buster Bloodvessel, who displays increasingly eccentric and disturbing behaviour. The tour involves several strange activities, such as an impromptu race in which each of the passengers employs a different mode of transportation (some run, a few jump into cars, a group of people pedal a long bike, while Starkey ends up beating them all with the bus). In one scene, the tour group walk through what appears to be a British Army recruitment office and are greeted by the army drill sergeant (Victor Spinetti). (McCartney appears briefly as "Major McCartney", on whose desk rests a sign reading "I you WAS".) The sergeant, shouting incomprehensibly, appears to instruct the assembled onlookers on how to attack a stuffed cow.
The tour group also crawl into a tiny tent in a field, inside which is a projection theatre. A scene in a restaurant shows a waiter, named Pirandello (played by Lennon), repeatedly shovelling spaghetti onto the table in front of Aunt Jessie, while arriving guests step out from a lift and walk across the dining tables. The film continues with the tour's male passengers watching a strip show (Jan Carson of the Raymond Revuebar). The film ends with the Beatles dressed in white tuxedos, highlighting a glamorous old-style dance crowd scene, accompanied by the song "Your Mother Should Know".
The film is interspersed with musical interludes, which include the Beatles performing "I Am the Walrus" wearing animal masks, Harrison singing "Blue Jay Way" while waiting on Blue Jay Way Road, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performing Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes' "Death Cab For Cutie" sung by Stanshall.
The movie was an attempt to combine the free-wheeling fun of Ken Kesey's 1964 cross-country American bus tour aboard "Further" with the Merry Pranksters, and the then-popular coach (bus) trips from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights. In The Beatles Anthology, Lennon states that "if stage shows were to be out, we wanted something to replace them. Television was the obvious answer." Most of the band members have said that the initial idea was McCartney’s, although he stated, "I’m not sure whose idea Magical Mystery Tour was. It could have been mine, but I’m not sure whether I want to take the blame for it! We were all in on it – but a lot of the material at that time could have been my idea." Prior to the movie, McCartney had been creating home movies and this was a source of inspiration for Magical Mystery Tour.
The film was unscripted and shooting proceeded on the basis of a mostly handwritten collection of ideas, sketches and situations, which McCartney called the "Scrupt". Magical Mystery Tour was ultimately the shortest of all Beatles films, although almost ten hours of footage was shot over a two-week period. The core of the film was shot between 11 September and 25 September 1967.
The next eleven weeks were mostly spent on editing the film from ten hours to 52 minutes. Scenes that were filmed but not included in the final cut include:
- A sequence where ice cream, fruit and lollipops were sold to the Beatles and other coach passengers;
- Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr each looking through a telescope;
- Happy Nat the Rubber Man (Nat Jackley, especially recruited for his 'funny walks', which the Beatles had long been drawn to) chasing women around the Atlantic Hotel's outdoor swimming pool, a sequence which Lennon directed;
- Mr Bloodvessel performing I'm Going in a Field; and
- The band Traffic performing their song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush".
Much of Magical Mystery Tour was shot in and around RAF West Malling, a now-decommissioned airfield in Kent, as it was not possible to book any London film studio at short notice. Many of the interior scenes, such as the ballroom sequence for "Your Mother Should Know", were filmed in the disused aircraft hangars. The exteriors, such as the "I Am the Walrus" sequence and the impromptu race, were shot on the runways and taxi aprons. RAF Air Training Corps cadets can be seen marching in some scenes, and during "I Am the Walrus" a RAF Avro Shackleton is seen orbiting the group. Some scenes were also shot in the nearby town of West Malling.
The mystery tour itself was shot throughout the West Country of England, including Devon and Cornwall, although most of the footage was not used in the finished film. The striptease sequence was shot at Paul Raymond's Raymond Revuebar in London's Soho district, and the sequence for "The Fool on the Hill" was shot (in a somewhat clandestine manner) around Nice, in the south of France.
For the psychedelic visual sequence during the song "Flying", some of the flying footage from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was re-used. As told by editor Roy Benson in the BBC Radio Documentary "Celluloid Beatles", the film lacked footage to cover the sequence for the song "Flying". Benson had access to the aerial footage filmed for the Dr. Strangelove's B52 sequences, which was stored at Shepperton Studios. The use of the footage prompted Kubrick to call Benson to complain.
The coach used in the film, a Plaxton-bodied Bedford VAL, carried the registration number URO 913E. The vehicle was new to coach company Fox of Hayes in 1967. The Hard Rock Cafe acquired the coach in 1988, and the vehicle is now completely refurbished. In the race, Starr himself drives the bus around the airfield racetrack. During the filming, an ever greater number of cars followed the colourful, hand-lettered bus hoping to see what its passengers were up to, until a running traffic jam developed. The spectacle ended after Lennon angrily tore the lettering off the sides of the bus.
The script of Magical Mystery Tour was largely improvised. The Beatles gathered together a group of people for the cast and camera crew, and told them to "be on the coach on Monday morning". The film was made up along the way. Starr recalled: "Paul had a great piece of paper – just a blank piece of white paper with a circle on it. The plan was: 'We start here, and we’ve got to do something here …' We filled it in as we went along." Lennon recalled in a later interview, "We knew most of the scenes we wanted to include, but we bent our ideas to fit the people concerned, once we got to know our cast. If somebody wanted to do something we hadn’t planned, they went ahead. If it worked, we kept it in." At one point, Lennon had a dream in which he was a waiter piling spaghetti on a woman’s plate, so the sequence was filmed and included in the movie. Some of the older actors, such as Nat Jackley, were not familiar with productions without a script and were disappointed by the lack of one.
The British public's reaction to the film was scathing. Magical Mystery Tour initially aired in the United Kingdom as a made-for-television film on BBC1. George Martin, the band's producer, explained: "When it came out originally on British television, it was a colour film shown in black and white, because they didn’t have colour on BBC1 in those days. It looked awful and was a disaster." The film was shown in colour on BBC2 a few days later, but there were only about 200,000 colour TV receivers in the UK at the time.
Hunter Davies, the band's official biographer, said that "It was the first time in memory that an artist felt obliged to make a public apology for his work." McCartney later spoke to the press, saying: "We don't say it was a good film. It was our first attempt. If we goofed, then we goofed. It was a challenge and it didn't come off. We'll know better next time." He also said, "I mean, you couldn't call the Queen's speech a gas, either, could you?" Writing in 1981, sociomusicologist Simon Frith said that the film was symptomatic of the transformation of "pop" into "rock", the latter being concerned with art and self-expression over mass entertainment. He described Magical Mystery Tour as "a willfully inexplicable TV special which put most of the audience to sleep" and added: "The Beatles were no longer in control of their time. Whereas they had once been able to seize on any idea and 'Beatlefy' it, make it common currency, they were now running vainly after a trend that was determined to leave the common audience behind."
McCartney later changed his view of the production, saying: "Looking back on it, I thought it was all right. I think we were quite pleased with it." He also noted in The Beatles Anthology DVD that the film features the band's only video performance of "I Am the Walrus".
In a 1993 interview George Harrison said the negative response from the press was "understandable too because it wasn’t a brilliant scripted thing that was executed well. It was like a little home movie, really. An elaborate home movie."
The film carries a 62% approval rating at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 13 reviews from professional critics, with an average rating of 5.3/10. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe notes the similarity between Magical Mystery Tour and the exploits of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In 1978, the film was parodied by the Rutles in their Tragical History Tour, "a self-indulgent TV movie about four Oxford history professors on a tour around Rutland tea-shops".
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