Beatles doc a curious character
Time capsule of band’s sessions restored, re-released
“Let It Be” is a 1970 music documentary about the Beatles, the most celebrated group in pop history. It’s also one of cinema’s most misunderstood and hard-to-find films.
This latter situation is about to change with the restored film’s streaming release on Disney Plus after years of being shelved in the band’s Apple Corps vaults. Which means it’s time to look at it again to see what a half-century’s worth of context and reconsideration might bring.
“It really didn’t get a fair shake the first time,” director Michael Lindsay-Hogg says in a new intro. “But I think one of the things which excites me about ‘Let It Be’ coming out again is that finally it’s going to get a chance to be embraced for the curious and fascinating character that it is, I think.”
Filmed in January 1969 during the rocky recording sessions for the band’s “Let It Be” album, the Beatles’ fifth and final movie debuted on May 13, 1970 in New York. The world premiere was just over a month after Paul McCartney publicly announced his departure from the group, although John Lennon had secretly quit months earlier, and George Harrison and Ringo Starr had staged brief walkouts.
None of the Fab Four attended the “Let It Be” premiere. It was a far cry from six years earlier when the quartet’s presence at the London launch of “A Hard Day’s Night,” their first film, required a mob of police officers and ambulance personnel to handle thousands of overexcited fans.
“Let It Be” was immediately tagged “the Beatles’ breakup movie,” a label as understandable as it was inaccurate. The band didn’t dissolve during its making and in fact went on later in 1969 to record and release its penultimate album, “Abbey Road,” which many fans consider the group’s best.
Originally titled “Get Back,” the “Let It Be” film (and album of the same name, also released in 1970) was an ambitious attempt by the Beatles to create and perform new music before the inquiring lens of Lindsay-Hogg, who had directed several of their music videos.
The film was meant to be aspirational, not funereal. Yet that didn’t come through thanks to its shrugged-off title, grainy 16-mm images, murky sound, ragged cinéma vérité editing, and a tense scene of Paul and George bickering over the guitar parts on “Two of Us,” one of many tunes the band was working on.
“I’ll play, you know, whatever you want me to play,” Harrison tells McCartney through gritted teeth, after Paul complains he feels like he’s “annoying” his bandmate. “Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play, you know. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.”
The film, which also included a close-up of a half-eaten green apple on McCartney’s piano (symbol alert!), was received by critics, fans and the band members themselves as the dispiriting end of Beatlemania.
“Let It Be” had a brief theatrical run and later home releases on the now-defunct VHS and Laserdisc formats. DVD and Blu-ray formats were reportedly nixed on the grounds they might hurt the group’s “global brand.” Dim and badly cropped versions would occasionally pop up in the dark recesses of the internet.
The film was entombed in the vaults, deemed best forgotten. But now there’s reason to think of it as buried treasure. As the restored version makes gloriously obvious, “Let It Be” also contains many moments of mirth and joy, especially the Jan. 30, 1969 rooftop concert atop the Beatles’ Apple Corps London headquarters.
Before police arrived to unplug their amplifiers, the Beatles, along with newly conscripted keyboardist Billy Preston, triumphantly played five new songs that have since become standards: “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909” and “Dig a Pony.”
It would prove to be the Fab Four’s final performance — although they didn’t know it at the time — and it had the salutary effect of re-energizing the band, at least for a short while.
The images are crisp and the sound is impeccable in the restored “Let It Be,” thanks to the work of Peter Jackson and his team. The “Lord of the Rings” filmmaker, a lifelong Beatles fan, used the same advanced computer technology he employed on “The Beatles: Get Back,” an eight-hour steaming miniseries released in 2021. It drew from 56 hours of unseen film and 140 hours of archived audio tapes that Lindsay-Hogg’s crew shot and recorded during the “Let It Be” sessions but didn’t use.
“The Beatles: Get Back” was a huge success, but it ironically served to further blacken the eye of the “Let It Be” film. Jackson’s miniseries was made on the premise that history was ill-served by Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary because it was edited to show the Beatles at their worst instead of their best.
There’s some truth to this — Lindsay-Hogg was clearly looking for drama, not comedy — and the recording and filming conditions could hardly have been less conducive to artistic creation.
Lindsay-Hogg put the Beatles into Twickenham Film Studios in suburban London, a cluttered and harshly lit space that looked like a psychedelic aircraft hanger. The original plan was to document the band writing and recording new songs for a TV special and later live concert, but the Beatles arrived exhausted from recording their double-LP “White Album” a few months earlier. They weren’t the happy-go-lucky blokes of their initial fame.
Lennon, with his soon-to-be second wife Yoko Ono constantly by his side, was in the throes of a heroin addiction. Harrison was balking at the idea of a live performance, which the band hadn’t done since it stopped touring in 1966. McCartney reluctantly assumed the role of taskmaster while a worried-looking Starr loyally kept time on his drum kit.
Harrison at one point left the sessions, and briefly also the Beatles, but his departure wasn’t caught on camera. He agreed to return to both only if the filming was moved to the Beatles’ Apple Corps HQ in downtown London.
In a stroke of inspiration and good fortune, George also insisted on conscripting Preston, a brilliant keyboardist whom the band had met years earlier when he toured with Little Richard. Harrison later agreed to the rooftop gig, which delighted many Londoners on the streets below but also annoyed a few people, prompting a noise complaint and a police halt to the proceedings.
There’s a difference in mood between the Twickenham first part of the film and the Apple HQ second part, but it’s not as great a divide as history — and my memory — would make it.
There are plenty of moments during the Twickenham sessions where the Beatles are just happily messing about. They do an impromptu medley of old rock standards, smiling all the while, while also rehearsing eventual “Abbey Road” songs “Octopus’s Garden” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” among other tunes.
Viewed without the immediate drama of the band’s breakup, “Let It Be” indeed comes across as the “curious and fascinating character” Lindsay-Hogg has always maintained it to be. It proves that the Beatles were always able to rise to the occasion when making music, despite any personal or business differences.
“Let It Be” is far less indicative of a band in turmoil than “Gimme Shelter,” a documentary released the same year about friendly rivals the Rolling Stones. Albert and David Maysles’ chronicle of a disastrous free concert by the Stones at the Altamont Speedway in December 1969 showed on camera the knife slaying of a gun-wielding concertgoer by a member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, which the Stones had foolishly hired as security.
As rock ’n’ roll downers go, “Gimme Shelter” makes “Let It Be” look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic.