that feeling for The Beatles that returned 54 years later

“Thank you on behalf of the group, and ourselves, I hope we passed the audition,” says John Lennon while the guitar is taken down and some laughter is heard from attendees or the handful of witnesses who had one of the milestones in the career of The Beatles. It is the end of the recital on the roof of the Apple Corp building, the last time the Liverpool quartet would play in front of an audience that was not that of a recording studio.

Lennon’s greeting is full of irony, because with his sense of humor he puts him and his companions at the level of rookies. after the revolution they caused and because they had not played live for almost three years, and also because the internal tensions in the most famous band in the world were already close to putting things at the point of no return. Did John know that The Beatles had little life left? Furthermore, those final words spoken under a lead-colored sky in freezing London are the finishing touch or closure of “Let It Be”, the film that was released in 1970, two months after the group’s official separation.

The film directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg comes back to life after many years of being practically out of printwithout being officially re-released or reissued in any format. This May 8, the Disney+ streaming platform makes the restored 2024 version of the film available to its subscribers which carried, perhaps unfairly, the stigma of being the audio and image document that shows the Beatles composing and creating music, but also exhibiting differences and tensions that had their strongest point when George Harrison decided to leave the band, something about what Lennon and Paul McCartney had to intervene to manage the crisis.

The question that must be asked is whether the reissue of “Let It Be” can be an act of justice or is it just the release of a collector’s item, improved thanks to the same technology used in the docuseries “Get Back” (from 2021), which will expand the archives of fans around the world. And the first impression is that the film directed by Lindsay-Hoog, in the context of 2024, clearly climbs several steps and deserves to leave that place that some assigned it to be the tombstone on the grave of the most famous group in history: The ideal would be to enjoy it as a material associated with “Get Back”.

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The 2024 version of “Let It Be” does not contribute anything new to what was seen after the premiere in 1970, beyond the technical issues of sound and image that obviously enhance it. The Beatles rehearsing and composing songs that will later make up the albums “Abbey Road” and the film’s namesake, jams from rock and roll classics, the skill and fundamental contribution of keyboardist Billy Preston (in this chapter of the band’s history “a 5th Beatle”); John and Yoko dancing a waltz to “I, Me, Mine”; George and Ringo adjusting “Octopus’s Garden” and footage of the band performing classics like “Long and Winding Road,” “Two of Us” and “I’ve Got a Felling.”

But thanks to his “daughter” born in 2021, with the monumental editing work done by filmmaker Peter Jackson, “Let It Be” now acquires another weight among the testimonies that remain recorded about The Beatles. It is positioned as a not so dark or sad story of what would be the prolegomena to the end of the group’s history. The ideal, at least for those who write, would be to treasure both productions in physical format.

A relaunch of Disney+

This new Disney+ release, to whose avant premiere La Capital had access, does feature in the minutes before the film an interesting exchange of opinions or rather a report by Peter Jackson and Michael Lindsay-Hoog. Two generations. The first had the challenge of using the hundreds of hours of footage that the second discarded for the original version. And Lindsay was a privileged witness of that time, of those laboratories that were the Twickenham studios first and Apple’s on Savile Row later. Although it may be brief, the dialogue between Jackson and Lindsay-Hoog offers an overview of the task that each had to face at the time.

“I was blown away by what you were able to do, using all the footage I had shot 50 years earlier. So in a funny way I see ‘Let It Be’ as the father of ‘Get Back,'” Lindsay tells Jackson, to which the New Zealand director, screenwriter and producer responds: “Everything you filmed in January 1969 I consider one of the most productive periods that The Beatles. It was a month in which the cameras caught them recording the songs that appeared on the ‘Let It Be’ album. They were also composing and rehearsing the songs on ‘Abbey Road’.”

Lindsay also describes the transformation that the original project had in 1969, the band’s live performance after three years of absence from the stage. “They were going to give a recital in front of an immense amphitheater, and I wanted to make a documentary of the concert; they had not played in front of an audience since 1966. And the truth is that after ten days of filming they decided that they would no longer do the concert, and we were making a documentary that turned out to be quite good for everyone, and it became a movie.”

“Let It Be” returned in 2024 with that feeling that music will always accompany us and that The Beatles continued to radiate light even when they were close to reaching the end of the road.