Product Description

Called "the greatest rock film ever made," this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour. When 300,000 members of the Love Generation collided with a few dozen Hell's Angels at San Francisco's Altamont Speedway, direct cinema pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin immortalized on film the bloody slash that transformed a decade's dreams into disillusionment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9105 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-11-14
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 91 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
To cite Gimme Shelter as the greatest rock documentary ever filmed is to damn it with faint praise. This 1970 release benefits from a horrifying serendipity in the timing of the shoot, which brought filmmakers Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin aboard as the Rolling Stones' tumultuous 1969 American tour neared its end. By following the band to the Altamont Speedway near San Francisco for a fatally mismanaged free concert, the Maysles and Zwerin wound up shooting what's been accurately dubbed rock's equivalent to the Zapruder film. The cameras caught the ominous undercurrents of violence palpable even before the first chords were strummed, and were still rolling when a concertgoer was stabbed to death by the Hell's Angels that served as the festival's pool cue-wielding security force.

By the time Gimme Shelter reached theater screens, Altamont was a fixed symbol for the death of the 1960s' spirit of optimism. The Maysles and Zwerin used that knowledge to shape their film: their chronicle begins in the editing room as they cut footage of the Stones' Madison Square Garden performance of "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and from there moves toward Altamont with a kind of dreadful grace. The songs become prophecies and laments for broken faith ("Wild Horses"), misplaced devotion ("Love in Vain"), and social collapse ("Street Fighting Man" and, of course, "Sympathy for the Devil"). Along the way, we glimpse the folly of the machinations behind the festival, the insularity of life on the concert trail, and the superstars' own shell-shocked loss of innocence.

Gimme Shelter looks into an abyss, partly self-created, from which the Rolling Stones would retreat--but unlike its subject, the filmmakers don't blink. --Sam Sutherland

From The New Yorker
The facts of the Altamont debacle are well known: Hell's Angels, hired as security by the Rolling Stones for a free concert at a Bay Area speedway, bullied and beat their way through the audience, eventually stabbing to death a young black man named Meredith Hunter. What is less well known, perhaps, is how skillfully the Maysles Brothers' 1970 documentary builds to that horrible conclusion. In the film's opening scenes, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and company light up Madison Square Garden with effulgent performances of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Satisfaction." But the Maysleses undermine the triumphant mood by intercutting scenes of the Stones ensconced in a cramped editing room, reviewing rushes from Altamont (including a truly wrenching shot of Hunter's stabbing, parsed and slowed for maximum effect). The pain in Jagger's eyes as he watches the murder footage lasts only a moment before he papers over it with his strutting-cock persona, which in turn dissipates almost immediately. It is the collision of these two extremes-the Stones as erotic gods, the Stones as chastened schoolboys-which generates the film's enduring pathos. -Ben Greenman
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Good as it gets
This appears to be a true and accurate record of these events. Very absorbing and of significant historical interest. The music is good as well!!

Tragic Classic
I have always heard that it is difficult to make a rock and roll film, let alone one that is also a documentary. Gimme Shelter is both- a filmed concert experience but one that also documents those events that take place behind the scenes.

This one gives the viewer virtually unlimited access to the Rolling Stones for their 1969 tour of America. We see the Stones as they perform at Madison Square Garden, working in the studio, and checking into hotel rooms. For Stones historians, there are brief glimpses of Ian Stewart- founding member and so called "sixth Stone", including one of him at the Altamont concert, asking for a doctor to please come to the front of the stage.

Some of the most fascinating scenes do not even have the Stones in them. These are the meetings that would take place in the office of famed attorney Mel Belli. Here is where the ill-fated Altamont show would be planned.

Last of course, is the Altamont concert. It was here that peace & love would collide with extreme violence with fatal results. Was it the end of an era? Did Altamont somehow symbolize the dawning of a new age in America- one in which Flower Power was replaced by death and destruction illustrated by the war in Vietnam?

Perhaps so but at its heart, Gimme Shelter was never intended to be a comment on the sixties nor was it supposed to make some sort of political statement. Gimme Shelter started out as a concert film about the Rolling Stones and it just happened to record something that went very, very wrong.

"Babies"
Saw Gimmie Shelter again last night and suddenly I felt like I was envisioning what the great artist Goya saw when painting the horrors into the faces of his characters. The buildup to Altamont, because you know it's coming, is full of tension and dread cloaked in the mundane. The footage shot from the stage ecompasses almost every emotion and reality known to man -- joy, sadness, fear, anger, sensuality, frivolity, violence, psychotic reaction ... as Goya saw it, the horror of existence and who we are. The most amazing shots: The hatred for everything Mick Jagger stands for etched in the face of a Hell's Angel standing right next to him on stage, staring....In the aftermath of the killing, young men in police caps -- yet clearly not police or police hats -- milling around on the stage ineffectually.
People have ripped the Stones for living in a self-deluded bubble during these times, but you've got to hand it to a horrified, at times speechless Mick -- considered by many in those days the devil himself -- as he tries to calm the crowd, appeal for sense and sanity. "Babies, please..." I'm sure he was scared the Hell's Angels might kill him too.
P.S. -- One of the Angels knocks out Marty Balin, and, go figure!, he got up and wrote the smash hit "Miracles" just a few years later for Starship. Peace.