Rainbow with Egg Underneath and an Elephant

Let's Spend The Night Together

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Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun Times Review

Monthly Film Bulletin

Let's Spend the Night Together
US (1982): Documentary/Musical
Roger Ebert Review: 2.5 stars out of 4

It all comes down to the difference between a "concert film" and a documentary. LET'S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER is essentially a concert film—a film recording an "ideal" Rolling Stones concert, put together out of footage shot at several outdoor and indoor Stones concerts. If that's what you want, enjoy this movie. I wanted more. I would have been interested in a film exploring the phenomenon of the Rolling Stones, who bill themselves as the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world, and are certainly the most durable. I would have liked to know more about the staging of a modern rock concert, which is arguably the most sensually overpowering nonwartime spectacle in human history, and which may have been invented, in form and in its focus on a single charismatic individual, at Hitler's mass rallies. I would have liked to know more about Mick Jagger; how does it feel for an educated, literate, civilized man in his early forties, with a head for figures and a gift for contracts and negotiations, to strut with a codpiece before tens of thousands of screaming, drug-crazed fans?

LET'S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER does not answer these questions—nor, to be fair, was it intended to. It is wall-to-wall music. The movie sells well in home video form; it's a cinematic Top Forty with Jagger and the Stones performing many of their best-known hits. But after a certain point it grows monotonous. At the beginning of the film I was caught up in the Stones' waves of sound energy, and fascinated by Jagger's exhilarating, limitless onstage energy. By the end of the film I was simply stunned, and not even "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction" could quite rouse me.

The movie was directed by Hal Ashby, a feature director whose credits include SHAMPOO and THE LAST DETAIL. It was reportedly photographed with twenty-one cameras, under the direction of cinematographers Caleb Deschanel and Gerald Feil. They've got a lot of good stuff on film, but they haven't broken any new ground. The best rock documentary is still WOODSTOCK (1970), and the best concert film is probably Bette Midler's DIVINE MADNESS! (1980). The Stones have been filmed more powerfully before, too, in GIMME SHELTER, the stunning 1969 documentary of the Stones' Altamont concert, at which a man was killed.

The worst passages in LET'S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER are the songs in which Ashby and his collaborators try to get seriously symbolic. There is, for example, a montage of images from a suffering world: starving children, a Buddhist monk immolating himself, the skeleton-like bodies of famine victims, decapitated heads of political prisoners, etc. The idea, I guess, is to provide visual counterpoint to the Stones' apocalyptic images. The effect is disgusting; this particular movie has not earned the right to exploit those real images.

The best passages involve Jagger, who is just about the whole show, with the exception of a truncated Keith Richards solo and a strange interlude during which would-be beauty queens invade the stage and dance along to "Honky Tonk Woman." Jagger is, as always, the arrogant hermaphrodite, strutting proudly before his fans and conducting the songs, the band, and the audience with his perfectly timed body movements. There is an exciting moment when he climbs down into the crowd and, carrying a hand-held mike, sings as he is lifted on a surge of security guards from one side of the auditorium to another.

It's fun, but it's about the only time we see the audience in this movie; Ashby apparently made a directorial decision to keep the audience in long-shot, making them into a collective, pulsating mass. But that limits his possibilities for setting up visual rhythms in his editing. In such landmark rock films as A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964) and WOODSTOCK, the audience provided not only counterpoint but also emotional feedback. LET'S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER seems to have been pretty closely calculated as just simply the record of a performance, and if that's what you want, that's what you get.

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Cert--PG(A). dist--Cannon. p.c.-Raindrop Films. p.--Ronald L. Schwary. assoc.p.-Kenneth J. Ryan. creative assoc--Pablo Ferro. unit. p. manager--Gerald R. Molen. asst. d--Charles Myers, Mary Ellen Canniff, Patrick Burns. ph-Caleb Deschanel, Gerald Feil. col--Technicolor. camera op-(Los Angeles) Craig Denault, Michael Gershman, Nick McLean, Dick Colean, Lance Williams, Ray De La Motte, Bo Thomas, James Glennon, Gary B. Kibbe; (New York) Gerry Cotts, Ted Churchill, Victor Losick, Michael Stone, Gilbert Geller, Robert Leacock. steadicam op--Garrett Brown. video playback--Location Video, Louis Mahler. concert lighting-Greg Brunton. ed--Lisa Day. addit. ed--Sonya Sones, Lorinda Hollingshead. asst. ed--(film) Peck Prior, (film/videotape) Catherine Peacock. m. ed--Michael Tronick. songs--"Shattered", "Neighbors", "Let Me Go", "Beast of Burden", "Waiting on a Friend", "Tits and Ass", "Tumbling Dice", "She's So Cold", "Hang Fire", "Miss You", "Start Me Up", "All Down the Line", "Brown Sugar", "You Can't Always Get What You Want", "Honky Tonk Women", "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Let It Bleed", "Let's Spend the Night Together", "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", "Under My Thumb" by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, "Black Limousine" by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, "Going to a Go-Go" by William Robinson Jnr., Marin Tarplin, Robert Rogers, Warren Moore, "Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)" by Norrnan Whitfield, Barrett Strong, "Time Is on My Side" by Jerry Ragovoy, "Twenty Flight Rock" by Noel Fairchild, Eddie Cochran, performed by The Rolling Stones; "Take the A Train" by Billy Strayhorn performed by DukeEllington; "The Star Spangled Banner" by Francis Scott Key, arranged and performed by Jimi Hendrix. titles--Pacific Title. sd rec--Jeff Wexler. Dolby stereo. m. mixer for The Rolling Stones--Bob Clearmountain sd. re-rec--Buzz Knudsen, Don Digirolamo. photo researchers--Michael Ochs Archives, Ron Furmanek, James Karnbach. p. assistants--Tom Burns, Justin Cooke, Gary Vermillion, David Knott, (exec.) Alvenia Bridges. with--The Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger: vocals, guitar; Keith Richards: guitar, vocals; Ron Wood: guitar, vocals; Charlie Watts: drums; Bill Wyman: bass guitar) and Ian Stewart, Ian McLagan (keyboards), Ernie Watts, Bobby Keys (saxophones).
8,196 ft. (70 mm.)
10, 1902 ft. 91 mins.

Original U.S. title--Time Is on Our Side

A filmed record of The Rolling Stone' 1981 U.S. tour, compiled from footage shot by fourteen Panavision cameras at an outdoor concert at the Sun Devil Stadium in Tempel Arizona, and by twenty cameras at the first two indoor shows at the Meadowlands' Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, recorded on twenty-four track audio, and intercut with a minimal amount of backstage and newsreel footage.

Let's Spend The Night Together is fairly aptly represented by its title: a raunchy invitation to a blast of superbly packaged memories. It is a concert movie, pure (or 99% pure) and simple, which comes surprisingly close to recreating the atmosphere, energy, excitement and even the lingering deafness of a good rock concert. What Hal Ashby had to do with it is hard to say: the production notes fail to mention him, and the Stones, interviewed recently on Radio One, divulged little more than that he was around and out of work. Perhaps Ashby envisaged a hippy movie for the 80s - he manages to cut some supremely irrelevant footage of burning monks and starving children into the "Time Is on My Side" montage, and the show ends with Hendrix's Woodstock rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner".

But if so, he has been defeated by the band's determination to "concentrate out front". Out front, it is all show-biz (or only rock 'n' roll, depending on how you look at it); and what Ashby does come up with is a near-perfect record, shot with Panavision cameras under close to optimum conditions, of some quite amazing concerts. In particular, the opening - with the curtains parting to reveal the band, and the subsequent long shots of the stage and helicopter shots of the stadium - is one of the finest moments in rock cinema since the disembodied voice in Gimme Shelter said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world".

Whether one sees the Stones as that is a matter of taste: what seems beyond doubt is that they put together one hell of a show. And Let's Spend the Night Together pays tribute to it: Jagger, thrusting his crutch at audience and cameras, doing a walkabout in the crowd surrounded by security men built like wardrobes in T-shirts, or soaring over their heads on a cherry-picker 'flown' by a man in a leather flying helmet; Richards, cigarette dangling, flirting alternately with Jagger and the audience; Wood gradually becoming indistinguishable from the senior partners with his instant vulpine grin; Wyman standing apart in posed aloofness; and the grey and balding Charlie Watts, looking as though his one ambition in life is to turn into a walking Mount Rushmore. The music is the music, not particularly well rendered here despite the twenty-four tracks, but creating a charge that the movie lives up to. The parade of garishly costumed "honky tonk women" seems a bit pointless but probably worked well enough on stage, the fireworks are spectacular, the balloons are nice, and the people, as they (used to) say, are beautiful .

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