DVD The Beatles - The Long And Winding Road Englisch 2015 AC3 DVD - Dorian

The most eagerly awaited of these (by us, anyway), is TMOQ Gazette no. 19, "The Long and Winding Road", which gives us the Beatles documentary that Neil Aspinall put together. It would be shelved for decades, and eventually reworked into the multipart series "The Beatles Anthology" in the mid nineties, now here's a chance to see what it looked like in 1972. The track list of the documentary gives us an idea:
It all starts with an intro taken from the Yellow Submarine film, so it's probably "Pepperland.." etc. Nice opening. Then we go back to the Cavern Club for "Some Other Guy", the Hamburg era is skipped, Ringo is already in the group and Neil's friend Pete Best doesn't seem to be in the picture at all. Next up is "Please Please Me", it'll be interesting to see what the footage may be. You'll notice that the first single, "Love Me Do" is not here. In between interviews, there's some footage of "From Me To You" before we go to Manchester for the colour film of "She Loves You".

So that's the British Beatlemania done with and we skip Sweden and Paris, going straight to the Ed Sullivan Show for the hit that fuelled American Beatlemania, "I Want To Hold Your Hand".
What puzzles me next is that we then skip the first two Beatles films, "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!", moving forward to the performance of "Yesterday" from Blackpool Night Out.
Moving swiftly on, we get a medley of songs. This could be a way of summing up the two films, or it could just be the hits medley from Around The Beatles?



Whereas the "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" films were thinly if at all represented, we get three songs from Magical Mystery Tour: George's "Blue Jay Way", John's "I Am The Walrus" and Paul's "Your Mother Should Know".

No "Lady Madonna" or India footage mentioned, we go to a rehearsal of "Hey Jude", or more likely, the reenactment rehearsal filmed for Music! - An Experiment in Television, followed by an interview.

The White Album seems to be missing in action, as we now move fast forward to January 1969 for some outtakes from Let It Be, interestingly "You Win Again", "Yoko's bit" (could be more of what we saw in the 1984 "Yoko Ono Then and Now" video cassette) and "I've Got A Feeling".

It ends with the final promo film, "Something", followed by possibly "The End" from Abbey Road, set to, curiously, Magical Mystery Tour film footage, replaced by film footage from the Beatles' final photo session in Tittenhurst Park for the "Anthology" version of the documentary.

You'll remember that The Beatles' all used to have copies of this film, which they entertained their guests with. George Harrison is said to have shown the film to Eric Idle for inspiration, as he was about to produce the mockumentary "All You Need Is Cash" with the fictional Rutles group.

Bonus tracks:
Rain (full colour, alternate footage)
Strawberry Fields Forever (full colour, alternate footage)
A Day In The Life (full colour, alternate footage)
Paperback Writer (Black and white promotional film #4)

Of the bonus films, the three first ones are sourced from silent films, the HMC company has added alternate sound to them.