Let It Be (1970 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Let It Be, the 1970 documentary film, ends with a line that few bands could have delivered with such perfectly calibrated irony. John Lennon, standing on a rooftop in central London, thanks the small crowd and then quips: "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition." The Beatles had just played their last public performance together. Nobody in the audience knew that. Most of them had wandered over from the street below, drawn by music drifting down from the roof of the Apple building on Savile Row. What the film captures is a band that is simultaneously creating some of the most recognisable songs in popular music and quietly coming apart. The questions it raises have never quite gone away: what exactly happened in those January 1969 sessions? Who, if anyone, was to blame? And why did a film documenting the end of one of the most famous groups in history spend decades unavailable on home video, kept in limbo by the very people it portrays?

• 2. A Plan Without a Destination

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  After the fraught sessions for what fans called the White Album wrapped up in October 1968, Paul McCartney decided the Beatles needed a fresh start. His idea was deceptively simple: write new songs, perform them live, and film the whole thing for television. No studio tricks, no overdubs. Just the band playing for an audience. John Lennon agreed. George Harrison, who had spent much of the preceding months in Los Angeles and visiting Bob Dylan and the Band in upstate New York, acknowledged that the new approach had merit. The difficulty was agreeing on where the concert would happen. Conventional venues like the Roundhouse in London were discussed and set aside. More unusual proposals followed: a disused flour mill, an ocean liner. The location that received the most serious consideration was a Roman amphitheatre in Sabratha, Libya. None of these ideas gathered the unanimous enthusiasm needed to move forward. Ringo Starr had a commitment to the film The Magic Christian pressing up against the schedule, so rehearsals were scheduled to begin before anyone had settled on a venue. Denis O'Dell, who ran Apple's film division, suggested that the rehearsals themselves be filmed in 16 mm for a separate television documentary called "Beatles at Work" that would accompany the concert broadcast. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was hired to direct, a choice rooted in his earlier work with the band on promotional films for songs including "Hey Jude" and "Revolution".

• 3. The Cold Rooms of Twickenham

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  The Beatles assembled at Twickenham Film Studios on the 2nd of January 1969. Cameraman Les Parrott's instructions on the first day were direct: shoot the Beatles continuously, from the moment the first one arrived until the last one left. Two cameras. Sound rolling all day. The conditions were not comfortable. Twickenham was cold and austere, sessions started much earlier than the band preferred, and the cameras were always watching. Harrison later described the sessions as "the low of all-time"; Lennon called them "hell... the most miserable sessions on earth". On Monday the 6th of January, the exchange that would become one of the film's most discussed moments took place: McCartney instructed Harrison on what to play, Harrison resented it, and a mildly tense conversation unfolded on camera. What the film does not show is what happened four days later. Around lunchtime on Friday the 10th of January, tensions reached a breaking point and Harrison told the others he was leaving the band. He went home that afternoon and wrote a song called "Wah-Wah". The finished film omits this entirely. Rehearsals continued for a few more sessions after that, and Lindsay-Hogg edited the footage of McCartney and Starr playing a boogie-woogie piano duet in a way that made Harrison's absence invisible. Lennon, captured on tape, raised the idea of calling in Eric Clapton to play lead guitar if Harrison did not return by early the following week. Clapton, years later, said the idea was never realistic. His bond with Harrison, he explained, was separate from his relationship with the other Beatles, and Lennon had a habit of invoking his name as a kind of bargaining chip.

• 4. Moving to Savile Row

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  At a meeting on the 15th of January, Harrison agreed to return. His conditions were specific: abandon the elaborate concert plans and move the sessions to Apple's own recording studio. With the live broadcast idea now gone, the footage being shot would become a feature film instead of a television documentary. Filming resumed on the 21st of January in the basement studio at Apple headquarters on Savile Row. Harrison brought an addition to the room: keyboardist Billy Preston, who played electric piano and organ. Harrison recalled the effect immediately: "Straight away there was 100% improvement in the vibe in the room. Having this fifth person was just enough to cut the ice that we'd created among ourselves." The cameras kept rolling through the rest of January. Songs that would eventually appear on Abbey Road were played and set aside. McCartney was developing tracks that would surface on his solo albums; Harrison was working on material that would form the backbone of All Things Must Pass. The group also played "I Lost My Little Girl", which McCartney had written when he was 14, making it the earliest song he had composed. The question of how to end the film remained open until someone suggested an unannounced rooftop concert at lunchtime.

• 5. Forty-Two Minutes on the Roof

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  On the 30th of January 1969, the Beatles and Preston climbed to the roof of the Apple building and played in the cold wind for 42 minutes. About half of that footage ended up in the film. They opened with a rehearsal run of "Get Back", then performed five songs that appear in the final cut: "Get Back", "Don't Let Me Down", "I've Got a Feeling", "One After 909" and "Dig a Pony". Londoners on the streets below stopped and gathered, looking up. The police made their way up to the roof and attempted to shut the show down, citing disruption to businesses during the lunch hour. McCartney responded with ad-libbed lyrical changes during the final pass at "Get Back". The concert ended with applause from those on the roof and Lennon's ironic sign-off. The following day, the 31st of January, marked the last day of filming. The band went back down to the basement studio and played complete performances of "Two of Us", "The Long and Winding Road" and "Let It Be". These were placed in the film just before the rooftop sequence, giving the released version an inverted chronology that placed the studio coda before the outdoor finale.

• 6. Cutting the Film Down

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  A rough cut was screened for the Beatles on the 20th of July 1969. Lindsay-Hogg remembered that this version ran about an hour longer than what would eventually be released. Much of the cut material involved John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and the other three Beatles felt that the balance was wrong. Lennon's response to the finished film was pointed. He said he felt the camera work had been arranged to favour McCartney and that the edit presented the film as though McCartney were the central figure while the others were peripheral. He described Let It Be as a film "set up by Paul for Paul". Lindsay-Hogg, for his part, said he had made deliberate choices about where to place the cameras to capture moments the band might not have permitted if they had noticed. The scene he described as "the back of Paul's head as he's yammering on and John looks like he's about to die from boredom" survived the edit. In early 1970, the name of both the film and the associated album was changed from Get Back to Let It Be, to match the group's single released in March 1970. The original 16 mm footage was blown up to 35 mm for theatrical release at a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which introduced graininess and required every single shot to be reframed, as the top and bottom of the original frame were cropped.

• 7. Release and Reaction

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  The world premiere of Let It Be was held in New York City on the 13th of May 1970. UK premieres followed one week later at the Liverpool Gaumont Cinema and the London Pavilion. None of the four Beatles attended any of the premieres. Lennon's ex-wife Cynthia and McCartney's ex-girlfriend Jane Asher were there. The Beatles won an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score, with Quincy Jones accepting on their behalf. They also won a Grammy for Best Original Score. The Recording Academy listed only Lennon, McCartney and Harrison as recipients, mistakenly overlooking Starr's writing credit on "Dig It". Initial reviews were largely unfavourable. The Sunday Telegraph wrote that music appeared to be "the only unifying force holding them together" and compared watching the film to watching the Albert Hall being dismantled. Penelope Gilliatt of The New Yorker called it "a very bad film and a touching one... about the breaking apart of this reassuring, geometrically perfect, once apparently ageless family of siblings". Time suggested that rock scholars and fans would be captivated, while others might see it as a "mildly enjoyable documentary newsreel". Retrospective assessments have been warmer. Owen Gleiberman of Variety called the film "extraordinary", writing that its moody, grainy quality had lodged moments in his memory after multiple viewings and that it holds "a place in film history" as "a scraggly elegy".

• 8. Decades in Limbo

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  Let It Be first appeared on home video in 1981, released on VHS, Betamax and LaserDisc by Magnetic Video, followed by an RCA CED videodisc edition in 1982. The transfer quality was poor. The theatrical version, already cropped from the original 16 mm frame, was cropped again to fit a 4:3 television ratio. German and Dutch releases in the 1980s used the original negative and presented a less cropped image than the American editions. After that, the film disappeared from official circulation and has not been available on home video since. Apple Corps remastered the film from the original 16 mm negative in 1992, and some footage appeared in the 1995 Beatles Anthology documentary. A DVD release with additional footage was planned to accompany the 2003 album Let It Be... Naked, but never appeared. In 2007, Apple Corps' Neil Aspinall explained the hesitation directly: "The film was so controversial when it first came out. When we got halfway through restoring it, we looked at the outtakes and realised: this stuff is still controversial. It raised a lot of old issues." A report in the Daily Express in 2008 cited an anonymous industry source who said McCartney and Starr had blocked a DVD release out of concern for the band's reputation. McCartney responded in 2016 by saying he was not opposed to a release, adding: "The objection should be me. I don't come off well." Peter Jackson's 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back was built from 55 hours of footage and 140 hours of audio from the original sessions. On the 8th of May 2024, a 4K restored version of the original Let It Be was finally released on Disney+, the first time it had been publicly screened since its original theatrical run. Lindsay-Hogg, reflecting on the two films in 2023, described his version as "a great short story" and Jackson's as "a great novel".