This week’s Disney+ debut of “The Beatles Anthology” is, for many fans of the Fab Four, a cause for celebration. The “Anthology” series is the only authorized Beatles documentary, originally produced in 1995 with the full cooperation and participation of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, then the surviving band members. The documentary has never been available for streaming or in any format beyond DVD, and now it has been not only restored but also expanded with a new ninth episode.
But some Beatlemaniacs of a certain age (say, Gen X and older) consider “Anthology” inferior to another Beatles documentary — one that, because of “Anthology,” is nearly impossible to see legally.
That film is “The Compleat Beatles,” originally released by MGM/UA Home Video in 1982. Its origins were odd, its execution borderline accidental: It was originally envisioned as a 10-minute companion film to a two-volume 1981 coffee table book of sheet music and other Beatles ephemera. A publisher named Delilah Communications hired Patrick Montgomery, an independent filmmaker, to direct, and sent him off to conduct interviews and assemble archival footage for the promotional short.
“Somehow we ended up with a four-hour rough cut that was the complete story,” Montgomery said in a recent video call from his home in Manhattan. “When the owner of Delilah, Stephanie Bennett, saw what I had done, she said, ‘Well, I realize now this is a much bigger thing. Let me see if I can raise the money to finish this as a full-length documentary.’”
Those funds came from MGM/UA, which was interested in augmenting its VHS releases of theatrical hits with original titles, and Montgomery set about completing the film. From the beginning, there was little question about the involvement of the Beatles themselves. “I made attempts to get all the Beatles to talk to me, but they didn’t want to,” Montgomery said. “John Lennon had just died a year before, and everybody was kind of shy about it.”
Additionally, Paul McCartney was already gathering materials for an extended documentary project, then called “The Long and Winding Road,” which would become “The Beatles Anthology.” Ever mindful of their legacy, and perpetually intent on controlling it, the Beatles’ company, Apple, even sued to halt the release of “The Compleat Beatles,” according to Montgomery. But Delilah had rights to the songs via the publishing project, “so they couldn’t stop us from making the film,” Montgomery said.
Many of the film’s fans (including me) think the objectivity of “The Compleat Beatles” — the fact that it’s unauthorized while still drawing fully upon the group’s recordings and appearances — is one of the factors that makes it superior to the Beatles-approved “Anthology.” It’s clearly made by people who love and respect the group, and it walks through their rise to fame and their time at the top with clarity and precision. It also explains their dissolution with simplicity but sadness, and mostly eschews personal relationships and similar gossip to focus on the music and its cultural impact.
Free of the imprimatur of the band members, Montgomery and his collaborators also didn’t feel pressured to sand down the rougher edges of the group’s story, or to minimize their personality conflicts, particularly in the later years. Their longtime producer George Martin, for example, specifically calls out McCartney’s “bossiness” — the kind of candor that is markedly lacking in his “Anthology” interviews.
“I think if we’d actually interviewed any of the Beatles, it would have made a different film entirely,” Montgomery said. “I think maybe because they weren’t involved, some of the people felt more free to talk to us than they might have.” And those who did were able to shed light on aspects of their music that were largely unexplored at the time. The Martin interview, which Montgomery called “the backbone of the film,” offers keen insights into their process in the studio, breaking down the specifics of their collaboration while detailing the curiosity and openness to experimentation that led to some of their most durable songs.
“The Compleat Beatles” has other virtues as well: the evocative yet concise narration by Malcolm McDowell; the ingenuity of Pamela Page’s editing, particularly a late, hard cut from McCartney singing “Let It Be” to screaming Beatlemania-era fans and a young Lennon saying that “we’ll be lucky if we last three months”; and a crisp, brisk pace that manages to tell their story evenly in under two hours. The film avoids the long-windedness and narrative lopsidedness that nearly sinks the multipart “Anthology” (which spends multiple episodes on the early days, then smashes the band’s last two years — their messiest and arguably most fascinating period — into a single installment).
The film was a giant hit on home video, becoming the best-selling full-length VHS musical video program until the debut of Michael Jackson’s “The Making of ‘Thriller’” video. It was so successful that MGM/UA pulled off a rare theatrical-to-video U-turn, mounting a small release of “The Compleat Beatles” to movie theaters in 1984 (Janet Maslin praised it in The New York Times for making “the group’s now-familiar story so very moving”). Delilah subsequently licensed the film to PBS, where it became a favorite for pledge drives.
So why can’t you stream “The Compleat Beatles” today, or buy it on Blu-ray, or see it at your local revival house? “Well, it’s very simple: Paul McCartney bought the film,” Montgomery told me with a shrug. “The woman who owned the film, who owned Delilah, Stephanie Bennett, sold the negative to Paul. And he just took it off the market.”
McCartney “wants to have all the spotlight on the ‘Anthology,’” Montgomery added. (A representative for McCartney did not reply to a request for comment.) And so curious Beatlemaniacs have to go to some trouble to see it, buying used VHS copies or (as I did) laserdiscs on eBay — and, often, the outdated equipment to play them — or keeping an eye out for unofficial rips on user-generated video sites.
Montgomery doesn’t mind. “Look, I don’t have any ownership of ‘The Compleat Beatles’ at all, but I’m happy whenever I see it turn up in chunks on YouTube,” he said. “I’m, in general, not in favor of bootlegging. But in this case, I am.”
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