Since its arrival on Disney+ before Christmas, Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, a colossal montage of documentary footage from the band’s bunker years, has been dividing viewers into fascinated, equivocal and plain bored factions. You don’t need to be a performative Beatle hater to find eight hours of warehouse chatter at least four hours too many. There is only so much tea and biscuits a chap can take.
A theatrically released feature edit – something close to what we were once promised – sounds like the ideal compromise. But, clocking in at just over an hour, Get Back: The Rooftop Concert turns out to be simultaneously too much and not quite enough. As the title suggests, the film is largely concerned with the famous concert on the roof of the band’s Mayfair headquarters in early 1969. We begin with the lovely chronological montage that kicked off the series: fresh-faced kids, Beatlemania, bigger than Jesus, All You Need Is Love, the Maharishi, hairy men in mansions. Then we move to the cold morning on Savile Row. The concert plays out in something close to real time.
There are, of course, wonderful, near-legendary moments here, but the experience is akin to hearing an album that, though of only modest length, still finds space for four or five bonus tracks. They begin with Get Back (the origin of which gave the series its finest moment). Few who pay to get in will not have seen the footage before, but it is an enormous pleasure to catch the remastered version on the big screen with decent sound. When that is over they, yes, play it again. The song gets a third crack at the close. Don't Let Me Down also gets two takes. So does the underappreciated I've Got a Feeling. We see much of the four Beatles, but not nearly enough of keyboardist Billy Preston.
All of this is worth preserving, but the repetitions do ask the viewer to approach the film as historical document rather than as a traditional concert film. The Beatles have long ago escaped the sphere of entertainment and become a field of quasi-academic study. The footage of punters milling below while bewildered police contemplate their next move will, however, divert even the most casual Beatlesologists. We get a sense of how much they were loved. We also get a sense of how, even at this late stage, they infuriated so many – not all of those people particularly old. The film’s arrival in cinemas more than 50 years later confirms who won that particular dispute.
On limited release from February 18th
