You can finally watch Let It Be again.

Officially unavailable since some time in the early 1980s, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 film about the Beatles began streaming last week on Disney+. But for a release Apple Corps has been withholding for about four decades—and keep in mind, Beatles fans tend to be such ravenous completists that they’ll happily pay money for remasters and box sets of material they’ve already bought at least two or three times already—I think the excitement around it has been a little muted.

For one thing, we have been watching the movie all this time. Original home video gave way to bootlegs, which gave way to Internet Archive and chopped-up uploads to YouTube.1My own source was my dad’s circa-1982 RCA VideoDisc, subsequently ripped to a DVD. It’s true the full restoration is an upgrade over the awful video and sound quality we’ve put up with from our previous low-quality sources, but Let It Be has not exactly been what you might call a “lost film.”

But I suppose the other lingering question is, given the existence of Peter Jackson’s 2021 miniseries Get Back—based on the same footage and also available with your Disney+ subscription—do we even need to watch Let It Be anymore? Does the existence of a nearly eight-hour documentary about the January 1969 sessions and rooftop gig make the 80-minute version superfluous? 

You want to say, “Of course you should still watch Let It Be! It’s a very different approach to the material!” And it is. The films even look slightly different; the technical aspects are beyond my understanding, but even in its restored version, Let It Be retains a bit more film grain for a less severe visual than the stark (occasionally waxy and overcorrected) Get Back pictures. But it goes deeper than that.

Get Back and Let It Be are both technically classified as “documentaries,” but Get Back behaves a lot more like the traditional notion of what that means. Peter Jackson wanted to tell a story; he frequently commented in the run-up to release that the actual events almost followed something like a three-act structure. Accordingly, events happen mostly in chronological order, with captions for context where helpful. If you knew nothing at all about the story behind the January 1969 sessions, you would walk away from Get Back with a pretty thorough basis for understanding about how things went down. (Whether you agree with the interpretation that emerges through Jackson’s filmmaking and editing is a matter for debate and personal feeling, but you would at least have a mostly2The “flowerpot conversation”… factual narrative.)

Let It Be, on the other hand, would be a terrible basis for understanding these sessions if you went in fresh. There’s no context offered for what they are intending to record, why the studio locations change, who Billy Preston is and why he shows up all of a sudden, or what the significance of performing on the rooftop is. It’s possible you wouldn’t even clock what the Beatles’ names were if you didn’t already know them.3I think Ringo is only ever identified as “Rich,” which IS his name, but you know what I mean.

But, of course, the audience that Michael Lindsay-Hogg was making his movie for wouldn’t necessarily need a lot of context. In 1970, you would reasonably be expected to know who the Beatles were and infer the relationship between the film you are watching titled Let It Be and the album currently in shops titled Let It Be. No caption identifying Yoko Ono was necessary; she was one of the most famous people in the world, after all. Jackson intended to make a film for posterity, but Lindsay-Hogg was making a film for its time.

Because of that lack of narrative imposition on Lindsay-Hogg’s part, Let It Be has become sort of a Rorschach blot, and that makes it interesting as a film but has cursed its legacy. Released in the wake of the official declaration of the Beatles’ breakup, the public widely interpreted this as the movie about how and why the Beatles broke up. This isn’t strictly true, but if you watch the movie with a mind to view it as the story of a band falling apart, it still feels like an absolutely vivid portrayal of that narrative, even if you know better. It is so vivid, in fact, the Beatles themselves frequently seemed to believe it in retrospect. 

Today, when the facts and timelines are better known, and when we have the more upbeat presentation of Get Back in the back of our minds, it is easier to pull a much more joyful reading out of Let It Be. It becomes more of a celebration about the act of making music, as Lindsay-Hogg omits a lot of what Get Back seems to be about, which is the obstacles to making music. Compare the Rooftop Gig footage: in Let It Be it’s an extended music video in which the interfering police are a subplot, whereas in Get Back the coppers acquire an almost equal weight to the Beatles in how the events play out.) Get Back is about hanging out with the Beatles as people and understanding their world; Let It Be is about hanging out with them as musicians and hearing what they have to share.

This isn’t to say I love Let It Be, because I don’t think I do. The visuals are striking, providing many of the images and ideas of the Beatles that we consider iconic, but the fact of the matter is, even at 80 minutes, I think it’s a little long for what it does set out to do. Personally, this is not my favorite collection of songs, either, and sacrilegious though it may be, I don’t find watching them mess around with old rock ‘n’ roll covers to be all that compelling, even if they do seem to be having fun with them. 

But I wouldn’t be surprised if, although Get Back debuted to greater fanfare, Let It Be gradually starts making its way back into people’s hearts and ends up being the more watched version of events now that both are available. Viewers were more tolerant of Get Back’s epic running time than I assumed they might be,4Although lingering COVID restrictions in November 2021 might have contributed to this. but is it something the more moderate Beatles fan will revisit? Those of us who periodically make it a project to rewatch the Anthology will probably make similar provisions for Get Back once a decade or whatever, but Let It Be is something you or someone you know might just feel like watching some evening after work every so often.

But, let’s open it up to everyone. Is there a “better version” of this material, or are Get Back and Let It Be apples and oranges?5Or if they’re both apples: a Granny Smith and a Laxton’s Superb, perhaps?