Long and winding road
Fifty-four years after it was buried by The Beatles, Michael Lindsay-hogg’s Let It Be movie gets back to where it belongs
WHEN Let It Be finally returns to circulation in June on Disney+, director Michael Lindsayhogg is eager to see how his long-lost Beatles film is received by a contemporary audience. Originally released in May 1970, it became what he describes as “collateral damage” in the band’s break-up. The reissue arrives in very different circumstances, after the huge success of Peter Jackson’s Get Back, which was created using Lindsay-hogg’s original footage. It’s a climate that he hopes will allow people to see Let It Be in a new light.
“This is a film that hasn’t been seen by most people for 50 years, so it’s totally out of a time capsule,” he says. “Peter Jackson always liked Let It Be and saw it for what it is. He understands that Get Back and Let It Be are completely different movies, made for different reasons with different technology at different times for a different audience. He was a real advocate and said Let It Be was the cherry on top of the cake. He thought it needed to be seen again to complete the Beatles experience of that particular time.”
Let It Be was first released a month after the band’s official split and none of the Beatles attended the premiere. Critics saw the film as foreshadowing the break-up, even though it was filmed more than a year before, in January 1969. Following the initial theatrical release, the film was rarely broadcast on TV and was officially available only through a poor VHS version. Reissues were considered at various times – Lindsay-hogg recorded a post
Anthology interview with Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn for one possible reissue – but nothing ever came of it. “Over the years, I made videos with Wings. Every so often I’d ask Paul about Let It Be and he’d say he’d like to see it come out, but nothing happened. Then after a while, every time he saw me there’d be a panicky look in his eyes.”
It means that most people have only even seen Let It Be through the poor quality VHS or via scratchy bootlegs. These both played into the narrative from May 1970 that Let It Be was a depressing record of the bickering Beatles on the cusp of splitting up. In truth, the film only captures one spat between Paul and George; for chronological, political and technical reasons, it completely ignores the time George walked out of rehearsals.
Lindsay-hogg now hopes that with more than 50 years of hindsight, people might have a better understanding of what he set out to do with Let It Be. “The film is about four men who loved each other but were no longer the Fab Four,” he says. “They were looking at life differently to those glorious years when they changed the world, and they were trying to work out what their expectations were. It was about four men growing up. You see great affection, but you also see them staking out their own turf.”
Let It Be will premiere on Disney+ in June