“It is not a dark, miserable affair. It is a quite liberating movie.”
So said 83-year-old American film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, one of the great early pioneers of music videos, at the New York premiere of his remastered 1970 documentary Let It Be, a little over one week before its May 8 Disney + debut. The project has had an air of gloom about it for over 50 years, and now, not just with some distance but the additional context of Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, the time has come to dispel some myths.
Jackson’s five hour exercise in glorious maximalism, released on Disney + in November 2021, was culled from the material shot by Lindsay-Hogg, originally whittled down to create Let It Be. Get Back, Lindsay-Hogg mused, can be viewed as “a documentary about the making of a documentary.” But that documentary has been notoriously hard to find ever since. There was a smudgey VHS print with muffled sound released in the early 1980s, which was circulated via bootleg (how I saw it in the 1990s), leading to its reputation as a downer viewing experience.
“Let It Be is associated with a period that turned sour,” explained Jonathan Clyde, the head of the films division at Apple Corps, the company the Beatles created in 1968 and has never not been active, referring to the April 1970 break up of the band. Though the film was shot in January 1969, Let It Be’s release in May 1970 wasn’t just a bummer for fans, but an opportunity for everyone to look for clues as to what went wrong with everyone’s favorite Liverpudlians.
The 81 minute movie consists mostly of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and even Ringo Starr (“Octopus’s Garden” represent!) introducing new songs to one another, rehearsing them, goofing around by playing classics, then going up on the roof of Apple Corps’s offices for a traffic-stopping performance. (“I hope we passed the audition,” John Lennon famously said as his last public utterance as a member of the Fab Four.)
There’s nothing in the earlier film about the urgency of the sessions, with their deadline toward recording a live album, a television performance, or concert event (all ideas that were scrapped) before Ringo had to go shoot the comedy The Magic Christian. Nor is there anything about the drama of George Harrison temporarily leaving the group, and everyone’s reactions. What is there, however, is the famous recurring image of Lennon’s then-girlfriend Yoko Ono glued to his side, which played directly into the hands of muckraking journalists who pushed the idea that this mercurial usurper came in and broke up the band.
Jackson’s expanded work has plenty of footage of McCartney’s girlfriend Linda Eastman hanging around, and also some of Mo Starkey (Ringo’s wife at the time) and a glimpse of George’s then-wife Patti Boyd. More importantly, there’s a little soliloquy from Paul about how much he digs Yoko, and how he and John being so tight is just fine with him. Oh, just imagine how many headaches would have been saved in Lindsay-Hogg included some of this in the 1970 production!
“Yoko in no way broke up the Beatles,” he said at the New York event, perhaps aware that there are still some out there who believe this. “John found a woman who was unusual in those days, an artist and imaginative partner—she was an avant-garde artist in New York in the 1950s before she ever got to England. She was looking to guide John in the way he wanted to go. She’s an incredibly smart and talented woman.”
What’s clear to me, watching both Let It Be and Get Back, is that Paul McCartney was a genius with a clear vision who needed to be ruler of his own band. It’s just too bad he never found someone else to bounce ideas off of that clicked with him the way John Lennon did. Furthermore, George Harrison’s backstock of unused material needed an escape valve, too. (You can hear an early version of his song “All Things Must Pass” in Get Back.) As a Beatles enthusiast, my take is that it was time for the Beatles to take a pause. I also believe that, had Marc David Chapman not killed Lennon in 1980, they probably would have all gotten back together in, I dunno, 1983, and released some incredible music, especially in the 1990s. (At some point between when Neil Young put out Harvest Moon and Bob Dylan put out Time Out of Mind, the Beatles would have put out the greatest masterpiece ever recorded; I’ve given a lot of thought to this.)
Anyway, I think it’s great that Let It Be will once again be viewable, but I do think it’s kinda key to watch Get Back first. For no other reason, it’s interesting to see how the two movies cover the overlapping moments. (Jackson did all he could to avoid reproducing precise shots, using alternate takes and angles whenever possible.) Both films have that fly-on-the-wall feeling, and the band really did let their (at times greasy!) hair down. Let It Be’s “direct cinema” attitude, still somewhat new at the time, can be a little hardcore—no one is introduced, no context to the locations are given, it’s just like being teleported into the room. Example: in Let It Be, suddenly there’s a fifth guy playing organ in a few scenes. Only Get Back explains who Billy Preston is, what his relationship was to the group, and just how cool he is. Let It Be isn’t interested in education, it is interested in immersion.
From a storytelling point-of-view, that can be a little lacking, but focusing on the music is hardly a fault. In January 1969, the Beatles were on fire, and songs like “Let It Be,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “Get Back,” “I’ve Got A Feeling,” and “I Me Mine” are considered classics for a reason. Even ditties like “One After 909” sound and look great in remastered form. Sometimes you just want to hear the songs.
Let It Be will be available on Disney+ starting on May 8, 2024.
Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets at @JHoffman about Phish and Star Trek.
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