Magical Mystery Tour versus The White Bus

Fab Four gone flab

I first saw The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour in 1978 or so, a scratchy and wan print at a midnight showing. After seeing the similar tour bus driven The White Bus, also originally released in 1967, I thought to give it a another chance. Was it still the witless psychedelic farrago that I remembered? Alas, yes. I guess it was too much to expect that the pop music darlings of that age could make an interesting film, but did they even try? The project seems hastily conceived and shot. Phantasmagoric moments as the bus tours the English countryside are interspersed with amateurish videos of the band's new material. The music, except for the truly mad I Am the Walrus, is subpar Fabs; the barrel scrapings of their psychedelic era. The only thing I can say positive about the film is that it is a link from The Goon Show to Monty Python. At least the band had good taste in genuine English eccentrics like Ivor Cutler and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus mines a similar vein of English eccentricism in glorious black and white. The Beatles' film had been inspired by Ken Kesey's adventures with his busload of merry pranksters. No such foreign or lysergic influence pervades Anderson's film. The short, 47 minutes, film was made to be part of a portmanteau project that would also include short films by Tony Richardson and Karl Reisz that would prove not to be. Shot in 1965, The White Bus had a brief release in 1967, but has languished in obscurity since. The film was written by Shelaugh Delaney, edited by Kevin Brownlow, and stars Patricia Healey. Healey plays a depressed London clerk working in a Brutalist building who embarks upon a train ride in a very gray London. The unnamed she gets hit on by a bowler caricature of an aristo, but cheers up when entertained by the antics of a cadre of Manchester United fans. The group sing-a-long is more winning and better shot than the one in The Beatles' flick.

Patricia Healey

The gal disembarks in Manchester which looks even more sooty and sinister than London. Happily, a double decker tour bus happens by and our heroine hops on. The passengers are a mix of English types, international travelers, and the Lord Mayor and his Macebearer, both dressed in full regalia. The characterizations are less exaggerated than in Magical Mystery Tour and the whole enterprise looks great, probably at the cost of The Beatles' catering budget. The groups tours industrial sites, museums, gardens, weaving centers, cake factories and witness Anthony Hopkins sings, very briefly, Resolution der Kommunarden, a Brecht poem about the Paris Commune of 1871 set to music by fellow traveler Hans Eisler. The picture occaisionally explodes in sequences of color, as in Anderson's If..., but nothing should be read into this. Anderson admitted he did so in desperation. He would use whatever precious film that was gifted to him by hook or crook. The film addresses alienation from a secure distance. Anderson pokes fun at English nationalism, class strictures, and the Church: all safe and easy targets. The Manchester buildings still bombed out from the Second World War leave more of an impact on the mind's eye.

Despite its limitations, The White Bus, especially in comparison to Magical Mystery Tour, is a coherent and realized picture from a director with a true filmmaker's eye. Ms. Healey had a haphazard film career, including two cameos in subsequent Anderson films, but earned a moniker that many would envy, Mrs. Englebert Humperdinck. They were wed from 1964 till her death in 2021.

In memory of Erich Kuersten