Apple Corps is bringing back Beatlemania by re-releasing the classic film The Magical Mystery Tour.
The Beatles had just released the highly acclaimed album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when Paul McCartney came up with the idea to make a film based upon The Beatles and their music. The film was to be unscripted and feature various "ordinary" people who traveled along with the band in a coach (which we Yanks call a bus).
The story highlighted the travelers who had unspecified "magical" adventures along the way and introduced us to six new Beatles songs — “Magical Mystery Tour,” “The Fool on the Hill,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Flying,” “Blue Jay Way” and “Your Mother Should Know.”
The movie was shot in color, but was broadcast in black and white on BBC-TV over the 1967 Christmas holidays and was immediately ripped by the critics. The original Rolling Stone review of the movie was comprised of a one-sentence quote from John Lennon: "There are only about 100 people in the world who understand our music.”
The album reached No. 1 on the U.S. charts, but peaked at No. 31 on the British charts. The soundtrack was better received than the film, winning a Grammy Award for best album in 1968.
Never before distributed in the U.S., the film is now being restored and released on DVD and Blu-ray on Oct. 9. Apple Corps will also have screenings of the 53-minute film for the first time ever on the big screen in the U.S. and around the world. Screening locations and times at thebeatles.com.
The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.
Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.
After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.
It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.
One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.
Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.
Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.
Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.
