one is a montage of her romantic encounter on the beach with the bus conductor Buster Bloodvessel (what a great name!) that’s less heartwarming and more fucking baffling. There’s two montages dedicated to Ringo’s Aunt (Jessie Robbins). It also means that we end up focusing on people in this bus ride that we don’t really have any investment in. The dedication to fluctuating from mood to perspective to story at a whim, but without much coherent sense of how they are placed, kills any sense of momentum this film has. Beatles’ films have never had what we would strong plot, but they tended to have a fair perspective on pacing.
But when one of your main stars is just standing on a hill by himself for a few minutes, showing his own face and him looking over vistas while his own song plays in the background, maybe I can understand where that critique comes from. I tend not to call art self indulgent myself, since what is art by its very nature. But although not every sketch of the troupes pioneering show worked every time, let’s just say that the Python’s had a greater hit to miss ratio than the Beatles. With the surreal comic antics and inclusion of British military guard running over British fields, one can easily see the influence this movie had on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to the point that Palin wanted to show the movie before screening of The Holy Grail.
I mean, even a less acclaimed work in the Beatles canon ended up having been a clear influences on other. But now that we have this free flowing, fifty-minute odd movie in the format intended, does it fair that much better? Answer: No? Not really? It’s complicated. And by directed I mean heavily improvised over the span of two weeks, with locations and scenes filmed as seen fit by the sprawling nature of its framework. Even on a not so well presented copy of the movie, partly due to the fact that its reception meant it was taken less care of (the 2012 remastering in very impressive though), one can see the importance of the colour shifts, the palette detours, fluctuating filters over landscapes (said to be leftover footage from Dr Strangelove), would be a crucial part in experiencing The Beatle’s vision for the film.īy that I mean Paul McCartney’s vision, since by all accounts this was based on a idea and mainly directed by him (Richard Lester being very much missed). Fair enough, colour television had only been introduced as standard the previous month (for Wimbledon), but if there was anything that could have been used to show off the technology it was probably this. There is an important element to their viewing experience, however, that also means some of these critiques were of a film that they didn’t completely experience its broadcast was completely in black and white.
When it first released as a television movie on Boxing Day 1967 critics were less than kind – the phrase self indulgent used quite often – and audience members made paralytic by Christmas meals and stranded with extended families were taken aback by an hour of walrus costumes, Wacky Races antics, strippers, truly dark absurdism and, in maybe the worse horror of all, having to experience a British coach day. In a catalogue of groundbreaking and highly acclaimed works in both music and the movies, Magical Mystery Tour is seen by many Beatles critics and historians as one of the band’s only artistic failures.