“Let It Be” with The Beatles is back after 50 years – Dagsavisen

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FILM

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Let It Be

Featuring: The Beatles

Director: Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Disney+

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The documentary “Let It Be” shows us The Beatles while they were recording their next to last album, the very last one to be released. In the aftermath of the split, the film was almost written off by both the group and their large audience. A welcome end to one of pop music’s most wonderful stories. When it can now finally be seen again, it is in a new and shining light, in a double sense.

How “Let It Be” got a reputation as a “sad” movie is hard to understand now. Perhaps it was because it came right after the break-up, when the loss of the group itself was painful for many. After all, the film mostly shows a band in a good mood, with John and Paul as an exceptionally dynamic duo, albeit with George a bit on the outside, and patient Ringo who is involved in most of the work. “Let It Be” as a film is just full of the joy of playing, and the joy of hearing good playing. For someone who is not a die-hard Beatles fan, the whole thing can probably seem somewhat long-winded, to say the least, said Arbeiderbladet’s original review in 1970. For my part, these minutes passed exceptionally fast in 2024.

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When I heard about the plan to relaunch “Let It Be” I didn’t quite understand the point. In 2021, the eight-hour long TV series “Get Back” came, in which the director Peter Jackson had access to all the raw material from 1969, and cut this together into a particularly exciting story about a few hectic weeks in the group’s last year. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original “Let It Be” was only 80 minutes long. For a documentary film, it was surprisingly free of context. Many of the sequences that in “Get Back” are experienced as the most dramatic had not been in “Let It Be” at all. In return, there are many nice music clips in “Let It Be” that were not used in “Get Back”.

“Let it Be” is as good as a pure music film where we see The Beatles playing together. We are not told that the intention was to rehearse for a TV concert, the group’s first appearance together in four years. No one had thought of which songs, or what kind of concert. We are spared the delightful, continuous confusion about what it was the group really wanted. After everything we know from “Get Back”, the explanations for what we see in “Let It Be”, how all these songs come out of nothing in a few weeks, are missing, especially how the song “Get Back” suddenly “emerges”, George Harrison quitting and disappearing for several days, Billy Preston coming in on organ and revving up the enthusiasm, and finally, the historically important effort of the support apparatus to keep the police away while The Beatles do their very last appearance together, in the offices of the Apple building in London.

– I don’t think “Let It Be” as a film deserves the miserable reputation it has. I’ve talked a lot with Michael Lindsay-Hogg about what it was like, he’s talked about how the group got involved, individually, and that he didn’t get to include George quitting, Jackson told us in an online meeting before the premiere of “Get Back”. He was full of respect for his predecessor’s ground work. Now “Let It Be” begins with a “conversation” between the two directors, in which they elaborate on their work. Peter Jackson has of course used his entire technical apparatus to give the film a new overhaul of both sound and image.

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It probably contributed to the negative perception of “Let It Be” that Yoko Ono always sits there in the circle playing along. It really looks like she is “taking care”. In “Get Back”, however, we hear Paul McCartney say that it will sound idiotic if people 50 years from now believe that The Beatles disbanded “because Yoko came and sat on an amplifier”. Instead, he plays the drums with great joy in a loose moment where Yoko Ono does what Yoko Ono likes to do with the microphone.

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“Let It Be” may have been the beginning to the end for The Beatles, but they apparently had a pretty good time together while the work lasted. In any case, the film shows a group in a formidable flow. Four musicians (and Billy Preston) who enjoyed themselves so much that afterwards they went straight ahead and recorded the masterpiece “Abbey Road”.

At the very end, after they have played “Get Back” one last time up there on the roof, John Lennon comes with these famous words: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition”. The reunion with “Let It Be” only reinforces the impression that the entrance exam had been passed with flying colours.

“Let It Be” is streaming on Disney+. The “Get Back” series is also still available here.