When The Beatles documentary Let It Be screened at a cinema on Auckland’s Queen St in late 1970, it seemed every hippie, stoner or university student in the city was there.
The Beatles were newsworthy despite their break-up, especially John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s media-grabbing and the singles Cold Turkey and Instant Karma.
But already, The Beatles were sounding passé. Rock had subdivided into more noisy offshoots, side alleys and alternative sounds. However, there was still great anticipation that afternoon. Let It Be was, we already knew, The Beatles as we’d never seen them: in the studio, chatting, rehearsing.
Some girls screamed when Paul McCartney appeared. They were laughed at. This wasn’t 1964 – which already seemed a distant age of innocence – but a more jaded time of adulthood, hard rock, marijuana and Vietnam.
In later years, when Let It Be was no longer available, the myth grew that it was a film of a band pulling itself apart. In my memory, it remained a small window into the internal dynamics of the world’s biggest and most influential group, with a joyful rooftop concert at the end.
But in the absence of the film providing contrary evidence – bootleg copies notwithstanding – the myth perpetuated.
Until almost three years ago and Peter Jackson’s expansive Get Back doco, which used eight hours of previously unseen original footage shot by Let It Be director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
We saw more humour and camaraderie than gloom and sniping, even though George Harrison quits at one point.
Now, the original Let It Be gets the Jackson hi-definition and enhanced sound treatment but – by being tweaked and edited – it’s a disjunctive if enjoyable oddity. Why are they in that huge warehouse space? How come Billy Preston just appears? Why are we now somewhere else than on the roof?
This Let It Be requires Jackson’s Get Back to provide the context and – aside from some tetchiness from Harrison and obvious boredom by Lennon and Ringo Starr – it’s also not the misery of myth. It’s like a showreel compendium of rehearsals, congenial jamming and the rooftop concert more complete than Get Back.
The original Let It Be arrived after the album of the same name, a middling and disappointing coda to their career. It took the gloss off the superior Abbey Road, recorded after the filmed events. So, back then, the audience was as jaded as those on the screen. Hence the myth in memory?
Let It Be now is not great or even coherent, as it favours the music over the conversations and context.
In the brief interview opening the re-presentation, Jackson chats generously with a grateful if deluded Lindsay-Hogg, who suffered collateral damage when his film arrived like a bleak obituary.
He still believes, despite all he witnessed then and Get Back now, he got them onto the roof and had nearly got them to perform in an amphitheatre in Libya to close his film.
“It really didn’t get a fair shake the first time,” he says of his Let It Be, hopefully burnishing his reputation. “Finally, it’s going to get a chance to be embraced for the curious and fascinating character that it is.”
Let It Be screens on Disney+.