Stuart Sutcliffe - The Lost Beatle
Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatleexplores the mystique surrounding the Beatles' original bassist, who left the band to follow a different muse and died from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 22. Told via interviews with an impressive array of Sutcliffe's family and friends--and through uniquely descriptive quotes from his letters--this hour-long documentary reveals a lot of intimate detail about Sutcliffe's transition from promising art-school student in Liverpool (and best friend of John Lennon) to reluctant musician (pressed into service by Lennon) to determined painter within the German avant-garde scene. A lot of Stu's story, as Beatles fans know, is set in Hamburg, during and after the days the group was a house band in the city's red-light district. Familiar tales of friction between Sutcliffe and Paul McCartney abound. But these are offset by a tremendous amount of fresh insight and detail offered by such important Beatles-saga figures as rocker Tony Sheridan, Klaus Voormann and--most crucially--Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer who influenced the Beatles' look and who became Sutcliffe's lover until his death.A very nice bonus is a gallery feature with a sizable collection of Sutcliffe's early and late paintings. On the downside,The Lost Beatlenever mentions the severe head trauma Sutcliffe experienced following a beating by Teddy Boys in Liverpool (an incident that probably led to his death and which has been documented in detail, as recently as Bob Spitz's 2005 bookThe Beatles: The Biography). Instead, the film tacitly endorses (based on unsubstantiated hearsay from Sutcliffe's sister) an old allegation--dismissed by Kirchherr--that a beating Stu supposedly took from Lennon in Hamburg was, ultimately, the cause of his death.--Tom Keogh