let it be (michael lindsay-hogg, 1970)

It's about expectations. The basic footage for Let It Be was filmed in January of 1969. The film was released in 1970. Between the time it was filmed and the time it was released, the Beatles recorded and released Abbey Road, and then, in April of 1970, announced they were breaking up. The album and film Let It Be came out a month later. Thus, expectations were that the film would document the falling apart of the beloved group. That the film was recorded more than a year before the breakup, that the Beatles, having mostly finished Let It Be, then made Abbey Road, all factors that argued against the resulting film as being the story of a breakup, well, expectations ... all audiences of the film knew was that the band was finished.

Then, 50 years later, Peter Jackson, given access to all of the footage, created a massive 8-hour version, called Get Back. The take on Jackson's take was that it showed the Beatles in a much happier place than the original documentary. Since few people had seen Let It Be over the decades, we took Jackson's word for the positive feels, and indeed, Get Back is much more than a film about a band in crisis.

This inspired Jackson and Michael Lindsay-Hogg to finally re-release Let It Be. As he had with Get Back, Jackson used technology to clean up the audio and video ... it's been more than 50 years since I saw Let It Be on its release, but it's easy to imagine that the film has never looked or sounded better. But where Get Back was a reworking of the footage, the Let It Be re-release is "just" the original film, cleaned up.

But our expectations have changed. Get Back convinced us that the Beatles weren't in such a bad place at that time, and now we go into Let It Be looking, not for signs of a breakup, but for signs of a great band working together. And, of course, it's there. But again, as far as the basics of the film are concerned, nothing has changed. Only our expectations have changed.

Does Let It Be stand up? Sure. There are some great songs, fun moments, and the rooftop concert is iconic. Is it a great film, the way A Hard Day's Night is a great film? Not even close. Lindsay-Hogg takes his fly-on-the-wall techniques to an extreme, never stopping to explain anything. So the film begins with the band rehearsing on a sound stage ... later, the recording switches to Apple headquarters. We now know this is because the sound stage wasn't working for the band, but Lindsay-Hogg doesn't provide us with this context. Similarly, Billy Preston turns up, adding keyboards and spirit to the sessions, but Lindsay-Hogg makes no comment on this important difference in the band and the music. Let It Be without context invites us to insert our expectations into the experience, and so the film seems much different in 2024 than it did in 1970.