On Let It Be

Why the Beatles' final film isn't what people think it is.

Today the Beatles’ documentary film Let It Be is released on Disney+. A lot of people felt this day would never come, at least not while McCartney and Starr are still with us. It hasn’t been available on home video since 1982. A DVD was planned to coincide with the release of the stripped-down reworking of the album, Let It Be… Naked, in 2003, and reportedly got as far as additional content being produced before it was shelved. McCartney addressed the issue in interviews, refuting the notion he was the one blocking it, saying he didn’t know why it was taking so long.

Finally in 2019, on the anniversary of the rooftop gig, Peter Jackson’s Get Back film was announced – and we were promised the original Let It Be film would be restored and re-released alongside it. Jackson ensured his film wasn’t an expansion of Let It Be or a replacement for it, but a companion piece, using different footage. After all, he reasoned, this was a chance to get unseen Beatles footage out into the world, so why waste that opportunity by releasing footage that had already been seen – and would be seen again when Let It Be was reissued?

Which made it all the more infuriating when Let It Be didn’t come out alongside Get Back, or feature in the very skimpy deluxe reissue of the album (which, at the time of writing, is available for a much more reasonable price than the original £109, implying people voted with their wallets when they saw how little was on it). Would it follow in a few months, maybe as a limited cinema release or on the blu-ray of Get Back? Nope.

All of this has only added to the impression already built up over the years, that the Beatles wanted the film out of circulation because it was too raw, or portrayed them in a terrible light, or would damage their reputation in some way. In the run-up to Get Back I repeatedly saw comments from people worrying the new film would be a ‘sanitised version’ or ‘revisionist history’, designed to supplant the more accurate account in Let It Be.

This impression exists precisely because people haven’t seen it. In recent years it’s become quite easy to find online, but for a couple of decades it was very hard to see anywhere. It was shown four times on BBC TV between 1975 and 1982 (two of which were on Boxing Day), and a friend of mine recorded the last of these. I borrowed his copy in the summer of 2000, eager for some insights into the break-up of the group. And what I found was… eighty minutes of the Beatles playing music. First in a big, chilly room, then in a smaller, more welcoming room, and finally on a rooftop.

That’s basically it. Yes, there’s a terse conversation between Paul and George about how George should play a guitar part. But I’d already seen that bit, because it’s in The Beatles Anthology, the group’s official documentary about themselves from 1995.

There’s a reason Let It Be ended up like this. The director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, had been hired to make a concert film, which had turned into a potentially more interesting documentary. But by the time it was being prepared for release, the Beatles had a new manager, Allen Klein, who decreed the film should focus almost entirely on music and almost entirely on the Beatles. (Billy Preston is not introduced in any way: he just starts popping up midway through the film.) Klein wanted to stick to the original notion of it being a substitute for a live performance, and he wanted to present the Beatles as a going concern.

Because the film ended up being released immediately after the Beatles’ break-up became public, the two things were linked in the public mind. Any little hint of discord was picked up on and magnified. But if you came to Let It Be with no context, you wouldn’t get that from it at all. There’s not the slightest clue that George quit the group in the middle of the sessions and refused one peacemaking attempt. It verges on being rather dull, especially in the middle. Any footage of the Beatles playing music is enjoyable, but with no attempt at constructing a narrative, it’s not compelling.

I’m sure the Beatles themselves found it a painful watch, because they had all this context, they knew what was going through their own minds at the time. I suspect they felt it did show the group in the process of breaking up. But after voluntarily releasing the most unflattering piece of footage as part of Anthology, there was no reason to keep the film out of circulation. Whatever their reason for doing so, it just added to the film’s undeserved warts-and-all reputation.

McCartney is often characterised as glossing over the tensions in the group in their later years. There’s some truth to this, though I think the tensions have also often been overplayed by those who crave drama in rock music, so you could argue he’s offering a necessary corrective. The position of keeper of the Beatles’ legacy has defaulted to him, and so an official project like Get Back was always going to attract suspicion.

But this turned out to be entirely unfounded. Get Back is far, far more warts-and-all than Let It Be. The section after George walks out is strange and bleak, incorporating a covertly recorded conversation between John and Paul that’s startlingly frank, and a drunk, maudlin Paul alluding to his efforts to keep the group alive by constantly keeping them working. Yes, it pulls things round into a feelgood narrative as they get back together and play the gig. But even then it’s coloured by our knowledge of what happened next – and you certainly can’t accuse it of being a sanitised take on Let It Be. Let It Be was the sanitised version, because that’s what their manager wanted.

I’m really glad Let It Be is finally back in circulation, because it’s an important part of the Beatles’ story and there’s a lot of great footage in it. But I’m also glad because it might finally become known for what it is, rather than what it isn’t.

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