Let It Be is one of the great lost rock documentaries. Released in 1970, the film has been unavailable for four decades – but now it’s coming to Disney Plus after careful restoration by the same team that made the superlative Get Back, under the watchful eye of Peter Jackson.
The film’s last release was on VHS back in the 1980s, and it’s fair to say that the new version delivers better picture and sound quality than that version: Jackson worked with his Park Road Post Production team as well as the film’s director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, to ensure that the restoration was true to the film’s original vision.
Why is Let It Be so special?
For a start, it’s a lot shorter than Get Back: 80 minutes compared to eight hours. But there’s a lot packed into that short running time. The band were at each other’s throats and would break up shortly afterwards, and the tension between the various Beatles is quite apparent on-screen: George Harrison even quit while the cameras were rolling, although he did return – albeit temporarily.
It’s very different from the artist-controlled biopics we tend to see today: the band were deeply unhappy about how they came across on screen, which partly explains why it’s been unavailable for so long.
Let It Be may be regarded as a classic today, but it wasn’t always so well-received: reviewing the original release, the UK’s Observer said it was “a bore… shot without any design, clumsily edited, uninformative and naive”, although it did praise the music. And Variety was similarly lukewarm, saying “As a 16mm cinema verite [sic] of four rock musicians in a studio jamming a bit, trying to get their music together, clowning and rapping a little, and finally doing a brief concert, Let It Be is a relatively innocuous, unimaginative piece of film. But the musicians are the Beatles.”
As a piece of cinema, Let It Be isn’t brilliant; the criticisms of it are pretty fair. But as The Village Voice said at the time: “and yet, Let It Be is a very lovely spectacle, a film to make you smile, and with its 16mm tawny colors and pastels, one that invites repeated viewings… it’s the first film to see The Beatles primarily as musicians, rather than myths, clowns, cats like you and me, or a comic strip… the film conveys not only the grand energies but some of the solemn mystery that attended The Beatles’ millennial collaboration.”
Let It Be will stream on Disney Plus from 8 May.
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