Let's Spend the Night Together

1982's LET'S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER is a rather confused concert film in that it can't seem to decide if it is a performance documentary or a highlight reel.  It doesn't much matter to me that there are precious few backstage cuttaways, the kind that lend a cinema verite feel and may give use some idea of the atmosphere and some insight into band member dynamics.  The facial expressions and body language of each Rolling Stone does enough in that department.  Drummer Charlie Watts always looks sardonically amused.  Here, so do Bill Wyman and Ron Wood.  Keith Richards is usually hunched over his guitar, chain smoking. Mick Jagger is arrogantly prancing and quite facially invested.

But the movie has this annoying habit of deciding to montage several images (usually of the band but sometimes, inexplicably, grotesque images from Vietnam) rapidly during a song.  Others are straight performances.  But Hal Ashby's film doesn't even manage that well.  By this point, the director's health and career were ailing, and his lack of clear vision is evident.  After the initial excitement of seeing the Stones in Panavision, at the Sun Dome in Arizona before thousands, the film reveals itself to be a litany of bad decisions.  What to shoot, how to shoot it.  At one point, I was almost screaming at the movie.  Even some no budget concert films have better shot lists.  The Stones create a certain live excitement, one that has earned them at least five cinematic treatments over the decades.  I read that Ashby collapsed at one point during filming.  This may explain things.  Particularly those meh wide shots, which only accentuates what a boring stage set the Stones used for this tour.

Truly bewildering is the editing, which is all over the place.  The montages are awkward, the transitions between songs laughably abrupt.  How can this be the work of Lisa Day, who two years later cut the brilliant Talking Heads doc STOP MAKING SENSE?

The performances run hot and cold.  Unavoidably, there is some spark, some moments of excitement.  But much of it is hasty and indifferent.  This is especially true of the Tattoo You tunes. Maybe the Rolling Stones, long cemented in the Rock Pantheon, were now becoming corporate comfortable, merely flashing the goods to a crowd that was probably wasted anyway.  The "Honky Tonk Women" number, with its parade of lovelies, is amusing.  I also did like the rendition of "You Can't Always Get What You Want".  Apt.

P.S. - The main reason I watched this movie? I'm working on becoming an Ashby completist.