Leave it be is one of the great lost rock documentaries. Released in 1970, the film has been out of print for forty years, but now comes to Disney Plus after a painstaking restoration by the same team that created the superlative. Come backunder the watchful eye of Peter Jackson.
The film’s last release was on VHS in the 1980s, and it’s fair to say that the new version delivers better picture and sound quality than that version: Jackson worked with his Park Road Post Production team and with the the film’s director, Michael Lindsay. Hogg, to ensure that the restoration stayed true to the original vision of the film.
Why is Let It Be so special?
For starters, it’s a lot shorter than Come back: 80 minutes compared to eight hours. But there’s a lot packed into that short running time. The band was at each other’s throats and would break up shortly afterwards, and the tension between the various Beatles is clearly visible on screen: George Harrison even quit while the cameras were rolling, although he did return – albeit temporarily.
It’s very different from the artist-controlled biopics we often see these days: the band was deeply dissatisfied with how they came across on screen, which partly explains why it’s been unavailable for so long.
Leave it be may be considered a classic today, but it was not always so well received: reviewing the original release, the British Observer said it was “a dull… recording lacking any design, clumsily edited, uninformative and naive “, although it praised the music. And Variety was similarly lukewarm, saying: “Like a 16mm cinema verite (sic) of four rock musicians in a studio doing a bit of jamming, trying to get their music together, a bit of clowning and rapping, and eventually doing a short concert , Leave it be is a relatively innocent, unimaginative piece of film. But the musicians are the Beatles.”
Like a piece of film, Leave it be is not brilliant; the criticism of this is quite justified. But if The Village Voice said at the time: “and yet, Leave it be is a very beautiful spectacle, a film to make you laugh, and with its 16mm tan colors and pastels, one that invites repeated viewings… it is the first film in which The Beatles are seen primarily as musicians, and not as myths, clowns, cats like you and me, or a comic strip… the film conveys not only the grand energy but also some of the solemn mystery that accompanied The Beatles’ millennium collaboration.”
Leave it be will stream on Disney Plus on May 8.