Magical mystery tour movie reviews11/23/2023 Each Beatle contributed ideas for premises that made their way into a shooting script of sorts, but the dialogue was all pretty much improvised. The plan was for the band to hire a bus, fill it with themselves and a gang of friends as well as a few professional actors, drive it around, and film what happened. The whole concept of Magical Mystery Tour is, depending on how you feel about such things, either an homage to surrealism or just hopelessly naíve. Though the hour-long movie, which first aired on BBC TV on Boxing Day of 1967 (admittedly not its ideal market), has seen a resurgence in critical support in the years since its release, it still feels too much like an experiment and too little like a finished film to be as engaging as what has come before. Influenced by both the psychedelic surrealism then in vogue and by their own egotistical belief that whatever they touched would turn to gold, Magical Mystery Tour is a curiosity in the Beatles’ career - and their first flop, which seems to have stunned them. A brainstorm of Paul McCartney’s, the film served as a welcome distraction from the turmoil that followed the untimely death of their manager, Brian Epstein - and it was also, significantly, the first film project that the Beatles really took on more or less alone. You can sense that feeling of untouchability running through Magical Mystery Tour, the film project that they began working on after the Sgt. The album was heralded as one of the greatest masterpieces of pop music, and the Beatles clearly felt more than ever before that they could do no wrong. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in June of 1967. Meanwhile, in between the summers of 1965 (when Help! was released) and 1967, the Beatles wrapped up their touring careers and began to intensely focus on developing their music in the studio, an effort which culminated in the release of Sgt. That script was never found, though, leaving the UA contract in a kind of limbo until 1970’s Let It Be. With two films for United Artists under their belts, the Beatles and director Richard Lester amicably parted ways, while Walter Shenson, who’d produced the first two movies, tried to find a script suitable for the band’s contractually obligated third film.
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