The Long-Lost Beatles Doc ‘Let It Be’ Is a Musical Treasure

“I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.”

So yukked jokester John Lennon from the top of the Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row in London on Jan. 30, 1969, concluding the tune “Get Back” as perplexed police officers made it clear it was time to wrap up the lunchtime stunt. No one knew it at the time, but this utterance would be the final thing a member of the Beatles would say as a Beatle to the public. It’s a bit of music-hall schtick, but oddly poignant, and it comes at the very end of long out-of-circulation film Let It Be, available once again on Disney+.

Coming as the last track on their last album, the off-hand zing now has cosmic significance. It’s a query from Lennon to future listeners, and also to himself: Will what we’ve done last? By contrast, just before Lennon’s quip, a more direct Paul McCartney shouted, “Thanks, Mo!” to Maureen Starkey, Ringo Starr’s wife, who had let out a particularly loud “yay!” Here’s a guy always ready to please the crowds.

If it sounds like I’ve scrutinized this moment in Beatles lore as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls, it’s because fly-on-the-wall footage of the world’s favorite Liverpudlian foursome is rare, and for decades this documentary was only available in blurry VHS dubs with bad sound. When Michael Lindsay-Hogg, an American director who was a pioneer of early music videos, released Let It Be in 1970, it was hindered by some generationally heavy bad vibes.

The Beatles officially broke up a month before, and the cinéma vérité style Lindsay-Hogg used reveled in ambiguity. With so little context, it’s hard not to look for clues as to why this beloved band hit the skids, and, as such, the movie has been a lodestar for conspiracy theories ever since. (Many still believe, erroneously, that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles, and if you go into this movie thinking that, the cuts to her can seem to be making that commentary.)

If you are a mid-level Beatles fan, you might be thinking, wait, wasn’t there just an enormous project on Disney+ that hit on all this called The Beatles: Get Back directed by Peter Jackson? Indeed, that five-hour bonanza—an orgiastic delight for the hard-core, but perhaps a bit repetitive for the commoner—generated its footage from what Lindsay-Hogg initially shot for Let It Be.

Okay, I need to back that up. The cameras started rolling, initially, simply to shoot a trailer for an upcoming television special, then the recording of a live album. None of that came to fruition but, wisely, everyone kept shooting, knowing that something would eventually be made of watching McCartney, Lennon, George Harrison, and even Starr (never forget “Octopus’s Garden”) introduce new songs to one another, then hammer them into shape. The quote that went around when Get Back came out was that it was a documentary about the making of a documentary. And now that initial documentary is ready for another look.

The two projects complement one another wonderfully. Let It Be concentrates mostly on the music. Though there are some moments of the band goofing around together and, occasionally, getting irritated, it’s fair to call it Get Back’s greatest hits.

But its style—one of immersion—is quite different from Jackson’s far more expansive film. Viewing Let It Be now knowing what’s going on in Harrison’s head as he introduces “I Me Mine” makes a world of difference. I can envision a chronic mansplainer (okay: me) grabbing the remote 700 times and hitting pause to say, “Okay, so what’s happening here is …” to anyone watching this without having seen Get Back.

But even without added context (or an obsessed narrator’s guidance), this is still a fun 82 minutes. Like I said, it’s mostly music, and I don’t know if you know this, but The Beatles were pretty stinking great. In addition to the tracks I’ve mentioned, “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “Dig a Pony,” “Across the Universe,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Two of Us,” “For You Blue,” “One After 909” and the eponymous “Let It Be” are all absolutely terrific. (“Dig It” gets a little annoying after a while.) It will never not be exhilarating to watch these songs get rehearsed and recorded.

Some might take issue with the look of this remastered version and its intense crispness, but I far prefer it to the alternative—a washed-out mess on Archive.org or the dub of a dub that’s in a cardboard box in my parents’ attic. Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back is better overall, but its massive nature is too unwieldy. For a quick fix, it’s okay to just … let it be.