The Beatles' Let It Be film to be released on Disney+

16 April 2024, 14:45 | Updated: 16 April 2024, 15:01

The band's final movie from 1970 is to be reissued officially for the first time in decades.

By Radio X

@RadioX

The Beatles' final film Let It Be is to be reiussed and re-relased on Disney+ on 8th May.

The movie, which was first unveiled in the aftermath of the Fab Four's split, has not been officially available since the early 1980s.

First premiered on 10th May 1970, Let It Be covered the same 1969 sessions that formed the basis of Peter Jackson's recent series Get Back. The documentary depicted the Fab Four rehearsing for an aborted live show and inadvertently captured much of the bad feeling and tension that contributed towards the acrimonious split of the band.

Let It Be contains plenty of material that wasn't featured in the Get Back series, while also including the electrifying footage of the band's final live appearance on the roof of their Apple offices, joined by Billy Preston.

The original film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who says of the restored version: "One month before [Let It Be's] release, The Beatles officially broke up. And so the people went to see Let It Be with sadness in their hearts, thinking, ‘I’ll never see The Beatles together again. I will never have that joy again'.

"It very much darkened the perception of the film. But, in fact, how often do you get to see artists of this stature working together to make what they hear in their heads into songs?

"Then you get to the roof and you see their excitement, camaraderie and sheer joy in playing together again as a group and know, as we do now, that it was the final time, and we view it with full understanding of who they were and still are and a little poignancy. I was knocked out by what Peter was able to do with Get Back, using all the footage I’d shot 50 years previously.”

Let It Be was shown on British television several times in the 1970s, with its final British screening taking place on BBC-2 in May 1982. A video release in the US the previous year became the source of countless bootleg copies - which for decades have been the only way to see Lindsay-Hogg's original cut of the film.

The restoration of Let It Be has been undertaken by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production with Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s full support, from the original 16mm negative, which included remastering the sound using the same MAL de-mix technology that was applied to the “Get Back” docuseries.

Jackson says of the film: "I was so lucky to have access to Michael’s outtakes for Get Back, and I’ve always thought that Let It Be is needed to complete the Get Back story. Over three parts, we showed Michael and The Beatles filming a groundbreaking new documentary, and Let It Be is that documentary – the movie they released in 1970.

"I now think of it all as one epic story, finally completed after five decades. The two projects support and enhance each other: Let It Be is the climax of Get Back, while Get Back provides a vital missing context for Let It Be.

"Michael Lindsay-Hogg was unfailingly helpful and gracious while I made Get Back, and it’s only right that his original movie has the last word...looking and sounding far better than it did in 1970.”