Its return in a restored version was emphatically presented as one of the most anticipated events by Beatles fans. Nevertheless Let It Be, the documentary by Michael Lindsay-Hogg released in the spring of 1970 when the band had already announced their dissolution and available from tomorrow on Disney+, for a good 50 years not only was it considered by almost everyone to be a missed opportunity, but it was also perhaps the only document in the history of rock (and what part of that history…) to undergo scientific erasure from the collective memory. A censorship in fact tacitly approved by the Beatles, while the few fans who had managed to see it at the time of its release summarily dismissed it as the sad narration of the end of the most influential band ever.
I remember perfectly the difficulty in being able to find evidence of it in the early 90s, when my and my friends' hunger for Beatles led us to look for any type of manifestation of the existence of the gods of Liverpool. The only thing we knew, and which came to us from a few biography and a handful of articles, was that the film had been a fiasco, that it had caused the end of the group and that it showed four people now incapable of being in the same room for more than a few hours.
Even in the early 2000s, when the advent of DVD led to the reprinting (official and otherwise) of almost every work put on film, it was easier to find digital versions of Slap face with Gianni Morandi or unthinkable titles such as Stuff – The ice cream that kills of that movie. Even the concert on the roof of Apple, one of the most iconic moments of twentieth-century rock, had become something in its own right in the imagination, unrelated to the project of Let It Beas if one day John, Paul, George and Ringo had found themselves there by chance with instruments and cameras and had improvised some new piece.
For years there have been rumors of a re-release of the film, continually postponed, as if the work brought with it something so wrong and so ashamed that it would even be difficult to propose it again as a simple historical document. Then Peter Jackson came along and The Beatles: Get Back suddenly gave the world the true nature of the three weeks spent by the Fab Four in the company of Lindsay-Hogg and his crew, effectively launching the official return of the original feature film.
In the nice chat between the two directors that opens the new version of Let It Be the meaning of this operation is contained: seeing the film again today, in light of Jackson's reconstruction, is a true act of justice. It's not a simple philological question, of sterile completionism or of continuing to strike while the iron is hot, but of finally being able to see that film with new eyes. Which then, the true condemnation of Let It Be, beyond the objective problems linked to the low quality of the images, was the fact that he had somehow become one of the scapegoats for the whole issue of the end of the Beatles and that he had had to deal with the mourning of an entire generation . Some took it out on Yoko Ono, others on Lindsay-Hogg.
Restored and remixed with the same technique used in Get Backthe film today appears in a completely different light, almost the perfect compendium of what was seen in the director's miniseries Lord of the Rings. The eerie sense of death that accompanied him in 1970 was swept away by the point of view shown to us in the six hours of unreleased footage from a couple of years ago. In retrospect, even the criticisms linked to the choice of images in the final cut make you smile.
It's true, Lindsay-Hogg had a large amount of footage available, but we must also consider that, after three weeks of filming, he found himself having to give meaning to a film created with one purpose, that of filming the first concert of group since 1966 and to bring the four back to composing as they did in the beginning, which had taken a completely different turn during the course of the work. He could not imagine that the idea of returning to performing live would founder under the weight of the egos and paranoia of the four musicians, nor that the initial enthusiasm in returning to writing songs live would be abruptly interrupted by the abandonment of George Harrison in the middle of filming, effectively forcing the crew to change locations and move to the more familiar Apple studios.
Yet it is precisely to the director that we owe the brilliant intuition of the concert on the roof, as recalled in the exchange of opinions that precedes the beginning of the film. «At a certain point we were full of very good material, but it was starting to get repetitive, so I tried to imagine an ending worthy of that moment in their lives».
All things considered, Let It Be it is neither a sad nor a boring film, as we have been told for half a century. As it is constructed, it is a sincere photograph of “a day in the life of the Beatles”, as the subtitle of the version released for the Italian market stated. A day built by putting together dozens of hours of recordings, but which, beyond the length of the beards which increases and decreases without logic, holds up perfectly. In just over an hour and a half, the feature film shows a band in the studio playing songs that were still unreleased at the time and which seems to all intents and purposes to be preparing for the final concert on the heads of an incredulous London.
The issue of Paul McCartney's arguments and despotism also needs to be completely revised. As we have also seen in Get Back, it is clear that he felt like the leader of the group, but the much-emphasized reproaches to the others appear as simple squabbles that happen in every rehearsal room, not just those inhabited by rock stars. Of course, the scene in which a sarcastic and exasperated Harrison tells him that he will do everything he is asked, even not to play, hurts the heart, but no less than Lennon who in Get Back he says «if George doesn't come back, call Clapton».
It would therefore be a mistake not to give the work a second chance, thinking that you have already seen everything in the Disney miniseries. In a certain sense, it would be equivalent to watching only the special features of a film, not caring about the film itself. If there is one flaw that has remained unchanged over time, it is perhaps that of not having given space to the many camaraderie and genuinely constructive moments available, limiting oneself instead to a simple series of jam sessions. It is therefore not the narrative coherence, albeit artificial, that is missing, but rather the temporal coherence within the three large blocks into which the film can be divided and a minimal account of what happens beyond the music. Without knowing the exact sequence of events it is difficult (and above all it was fifty years ago) to understand why the group starts in one studio and then finds itself in another, or why, suddenly, Billy Preston also appears in the sessions, as if had suddenly emerged from the Apple bathrooms. All things that today, thanks to Jackson's work, we are able to make sense of.