LAMBERT & STAMP Rating: NNN See listing.
Where to watch: Netflix, iTunes
Famed rockers the Who are back on the road after 50 years in the business – and at least four “final tours.”
So it’s a good time for James D. Cooper’s doc about the partnership between Christopher Stamp and Kit Lambert, the band’s first managers. They helped lead the quartet to stardom and eventually formed a record label that released LPs by Jimi Hendrix, Thunderclap Newman and others.
Lambert and Stamp were an unlikely pair, the former a posh, gay Oxford grad – the dancer Margot Fonteyn was his godmother, composer William Walton his godfather – and the latter a working-class stiff. But they both aspired to be filmmakers, and Stamp’s work in the movie industry funded the Who (known originally as the High Numbers) project in the early days.
Crucially for this doc’s purposes, the duo never intended to manage a rock group – they wanted to make a movie. Consequently, they filmed all the band’s early meetings, nights out and gigs. Lambert played an essential role in encouraging Pete Townshend’s songwriting, which is an important tidbit, but most of the info here won’t be new to Who fans. That early footage, on the other hand, is documentary gold.
What sinks the film is the last 15 minutes, when the narrative continues after Lambert’s death. We know he got into drugs and had a breakdown, but we never find out how he died. Beyond ridiculous. 117 minutes.
