“It really didn’t get a fair shake the first time,” Michael Lindsay-Hogg tells Peter Jackson in a new introductory interview to the first release since 1970 of Lindsay-Hogg’s fly-on-the-studio-wall Beatles film Let It Be. “Finally it’s going to get a chance to be embraced for the curious and fascinating character that it is.”
Its original release, Lindsay-Hogg has argued, was overshadowed by the band’s split just weeks before; 1970’s viewers watched Let It Be in a state of grief. As it arrives on Disney+, though, the audience of 2024 will find themselves similarly tainted towards it – this time, though, we know too much. Refreshed and revitalised as the film has been by the brushing-up process of Jackson’s 2021 exhaustive eight-hour series Get Back – drawn from Lindsay-Hogg’s original 1969 footage – it’s now glaringly obvious how much has been left out. The tedium and tension that made Jackson’s series so engrossing – particularly George’s…