“Let It Be” Trailer Reveals the Fully Restored 1970 Film After a 50 Year Wait
The first trailer for the fully restored “Let It Be” has arrived.
Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original 1970 film about The Beatles has been meticulously restored by Peter Jackson, following Jackson’s deep dive docuseries The Beatles: Get Back, which was released on Disney+ in 2021. Let It Be will arrive on Disney+ on May 8, marking the first time it’s been available in over 50 years.
Let It Be was first released at a tumultuous time, in May of 1970, one month after the band broke up. This meant that Linday-Hogg’s film was shrouded in a bittersweetness. “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,’ and it very much darkened the perception of the film,” Lindsay-Hogg said in a press release for the newly restored version. “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? And 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 the 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.”
This new restoration boasts footage that wasn’t featured in Jackson’s Get Back, including access to the Beatles studio in London where, along with Billy Preston, they wrote and recorded their seminal album “Let It Be.” The film also reveals the final time the band performed live. Jackson and his team completed a thorough restoration of the film from the original 16mm negative, which meant remastering the sound using the same MAL de-mix technology that Jackson deployed for Get Back.
“I’m absolutely thrilled that Michael’s movie, ‘Let It Be,’ has been restored and is finally being re-released after being unavailable for decades,” Jackson said in a press release. “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.”
Check out the trailer below. Let It Be arrives on Disney+ on May 8:
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Featured image: L-r: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and John Lennon in “The Beatles: Get Back.” Photo by Linda McCartney. Courtesy Apple Corps Ltd.
