Gimme Shelter (1970)**** (out of 4) The Maysles' landmark documentary covering The Rolling Stones 1969 tour of the United States, which was to end with a free concert in San Fransisco at the Altamont Speedway. While the band and everyone else had great hopes for the free show, it turned into a disaster as concert goers went up against the Hell's Angels who were working as security.A lot of films get the reputation as being the "greatest" of something. Most people consider CITIZEN KANE to be the greatest movie ever made and many consider GIMME SHELTER to be the greatest documentary ever made. I'm certainly not going to debate that because it's amazing how terrific this movie is on so many different levels. On on level it's amazing because the Stones really are incredibly strong with the music as we get clips from a New York show as well as Altamont. Another reason the movie is so powerful is that it has footage of the band in the studio as they were making their Sticky Fingers album. Finally, the film works brilliantly as a thriller.Yes, GIMME SHELTER works perfectly as a thriller because most people are going to come into the movie knowing what happened at that free concert. The events that night ended up turning deadly and like a great Hitchcock thriller, this one plants in your mind that things are going to turn out bad. At the very start of the picture we're given bits of information of the deadly encounter at the end so that there was pretty much the directors starting the time bomb and the intensity just keeps building up in the viewer's mind because you know it's eventually going to go off.As I said, the film simply works on so many terrific levels that it's almost sad that the movies ends on such a down notes. The musical performances throughout the picture are quite wonderful and there's no question that the band was full of energy and it really does show throughout the numbers and especially with the early stuff in New York. Satisfaction, Honky Tonk Woman, Street Fighting Man and Jumpin' Jack Flash are just a few of the tunes that sound terrific and just leap off the screen. Then there's the stuff in Altamont including Sympathy for the Devil and Under My Thumb. The performance from the band is great but what's so remarkable is seeing them struggle to try and keep the crowd under control as the mounting danger just continues to build.GIMME SHELTER really is 90 minutes of pure entertainment. Some of it, like the music, is of a very high entertainment. Seeing the hundreds of thousands of people showing up to jam is a perfect image of these type of music festivals back in the day. The other entertainment, the ugly side, is the disaster that is playing out in front of your eyes as more and more fights begin to happen and of course it eventually leads to a death. This film will certainly appeal to fans of The Rolling Stones but it's going to be even more appealing to those who don't even know the band because of how great the film itself is.

If anything, Altamont proved that you can't reproduce or manufacture a phenomenon. Superficially billed as 'Woodstock West', the concert turned destructive and violent with the presence of the Hells Angels purportedly providing security for the event. The flower power of the Sixties turned into a convoluted mix of dope, rock and roll and stoned out hippies tripping to the music of the Rolling Stones while all hell was breaking loose in front of the stage where a man was murdered and no one seemed capable of stopping it. The legacy of Altamont closed out a decade that had started out promising enough with the British Invasion, Motown, the surf sound and assorted other musical styles. The Rolling Stones were a big part of that era, and knowing of their antics back in the day, one wonders how they managed to stay in shape to be playing right up to the present. As a chronicle of the Altamont concert, "Gimme Shelter" is capable but largely unexceptional. There's not a Stones song you won't recognize if you're a fan, some done better than others, and a handful presented merely as background music for a contemplative Jagger and Charlie Watts as they review the events captured on film prior to this picture's release. Credit goes to Jagger and Grace Slick for trying to gain some control when things started to heat up with the crowd and the Hells Angels, but ultimately Jagger doesn't appear too shaken by what happened. He seems to show more surprise at the remarks of Sonny Barger dumping on the band and admonishing the concert goers - "When they jumped on an Angel, they got hurt".

A documentary crew tails the Rolling Stones for a leg of their 1969 North American tour and unwittingly captures one of the nastiest, bloodiest all-day concerts in music history - the infamous Altamont Speedway show. Mostly pieced together from ambient hand-held shots taken on the day of the festival and shown sans narration, it's a stunning stream-of-consciousness presentation of the crowds, cultures and events leading up to the angry, violent personality of the gig itself. It's stunning just how little foresight and planning went into this event, as two days beforehand organizers were still trying to settle on a venue with little or no mind paid to such vital elements as parking, waste management or security. Maybe that kind of mindset would have worked for a small or mid-sized show, but with a crowd in excess of 300,000 showing up to take in what was being portrayed as "Woodstock of the West," the only possible outcome of such an awful strategy is total, unmitigated chaos. And that's what they got, as a pushy, balls-tripping audience ran headlong into a moody, fight-spoiling security outfit and lit a set of tragic fireworks. A painfully slow degradation of civility and humanity set to music, it's a dark counterpoint to the radiant, optimistic attitudes seen at Woodstock.

I only heard about this documentary because it was listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and starring one of the most well known British bands, it had to be worth a go. Basically this documentary focuses on The Rolling Stone, with members Mick Jagger, Keith Richards Keith, Mick Taylor (replaced by Ronnie Wood four years later) and Charlie Watts, talking a little about their career and singing of course. But the main focus of the film is on the disastrous free concert performance, which they performed in Northern California, east of Oakland at Altamont Speedway, four months following Woodstock, near the end of their 1969 tour of the USA. 300,00 people crowded to watch the show, and Hell's Angels were put in charge of security, but these men instead spent most of the concert armed with pool cues and knives beating people up, with at least one being killed. The film is made up of footage from the concert itself, including the violence that ensued and Mick Jagger trying to calm things down on stage, some of the point of view from drugged up and dancing spectators, and The Rolling Stones watching it all back and reflecting. Also starring Bill Wyman, Ike Turner, Tina Turner, Grace Slick and Skip Spence Skip. I knew it was going to be a film with plenty of the Stones' songs, but I wasn't expecting there to be a dark incidence being the main focus, it is relatively interesting viewing, but the songs were more enjoyable for me, an alright music documentary. Songs in the film include the song of the title, "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", "Wild Horses", "Brown Sugar", "Love in Vain", "Honky Tonk Women", "Sympathy for the Devil" and a few others. Good!