Disney Plus' restoration of The Beatles' Let It Be documentary looks like a window in time in its first trailer
The best way to see The Beatles in their very final sessions
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Let It Beis one of the great lost rock documentaries. Released in 1970, the film has been unavailable for four decades – but now it’s coming toDisney Plusafter careful restoration by the same team that made the superlativeGet 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 thanGet 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 Bemay 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. AndVarietywas 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 Beis a relatively innocuous, unimaginative piece of film. But the musicians are the Beatles.”
As a piece of cinema,Let It Beisn’t brilliant; the criticisms of it are pretty fair. But asThe Village Voicesaid at the time: “and yet,Let It Beis 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 Bewill stream on Disney Plus from 8 May.
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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.
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