Magical Mystery Tour

The cinematic accompaniment to the first half of The Beatles' 1967 album of the same name, Magical Mystery Tour is consistently the most maligned of all of the Fab Four's movies. So is its reputation as a pointless and self-indulgent production at all warranted? Absolutely.

Unscripted and painfully impromptu, the film, which originally aired as a BBC special, presents Ringo and his fictional Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins) joining a rural bus trek where John, Paul and George occasionally appear in the background. Poorly shot and edited, the tour is neither magical nor mysterious, since it mainly spotlights English character actors hamming it up for no apparent reason. There are musical numbers, of course, and the songs, including the fascinatingly eerie "Blue Jay Way" and the compact absurdist epic "I Am the Walrus," are all outstanding, but the segments accompanying the tunes are mediocre at best. (Witness the inexcusably lame cover-featured costumes of "Walrus" as one of many aesthetic blunders.) All but unwatchable to anyone except diehard fans, Magical Mystery Tour is an awkward combination of great tracks, awful visuals, and thoroughly unappealing narrative nonsense that accomplishes one thing quite well -- it makes all other Beatles films appear that much better.