Review: Pink Floyd at Pompeii — MCMLXXII — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Pink Floyd at Pompeii — MCMLXXII 

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: G

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

Stars: David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason

Director: Adrian Maben

 

In the early 1970s, the British rock group Pink Floyd was poised to leave behind its beloved but increasingly self-indulgent blend of blues and psychedelia in favor of catchy, thematically complex songs that might, in the words of band member Nick Mason, make them “far less difficult to enjoy.”

But before they could move on to the commercial heights of “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall,” there would be one last hurrah for Pink Floyd 1.0. Over a six-day period in October 1971, the boys, accompanied by a small collection of recording engineers and a film crew, commandeered the ancient amphitheater in Pompeii, Italy to perform — with no audience — some greatest hits from their earliest recordings.

When Pink Floyd at Pompeii was first released to theaters in 1972, hardcore Floyd fans felt immediate pangs of nostalgia for the band’s earlier, stridently experimental era. Fifty-three years later, re-released for IMAX with a sparkling 4K restoration and spectacularly remixed sound, the film excavates new layers of sentiment, the primary one being, “Were we ever that young?”

In making their first concert film, Pink Floyd insisted that there be no audience — intent on distancing themselves from concert flicks like Woodstock and Monterey Pop, which had sacrificed aural quality for gritty you-are-there authenticity. The ruins of Pompeii, buried in ash from the volcano Vesuvius in 79 AD, offered a pretty perfect setting; a conflicted combination of human habitat and decayed desolation.

So, there they stand in the stadium’s center, where gladiators battled to the death and hunters slayed exotic animals, tuning their guitars, checking the pickups on the piano, rattling the drum set. Bassist Roger Waters is manning the group’s enormous brass gong. Drummer Nick Mason is pounding away so relentlessly he barely notices he’s tossed one stick out of reach. Guitarist David Gilmour and keyboardist Richard Wright are shirtless in the Mediterranean sun, as are the sound technicians hovering over the massive soundboard—proof positive that this performance is no lip-synched studio recording; these guys are performing live, without a net.

The playlist, mostly lengthy early catalog selections, unfolds in dreamlike arcs and vales that seem ready to conjure up the ghosts of Pompeii — represented here by frescoes and sculptures shown in cleverly edited snippets and as monstrous photographic backgrounds, looming over the musicians.

For those of us who didn’t catch up with Pink Floyd until that rhythmic cash register opening of “Money” (1972), most of these are deep cuts indeed. “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” plays almost like a conventional song, but “Echoes,” “One of These Days,” and “Careful with That Axe Eugene” are less songs than exercises in we-dare-you-to-stop-us musical ingenuity. “A Saucerful of Secrets,” nearly 13 minutes of gongs, scat-like guitar riffs, syncopated drumbeats, and a piano line that involves Wright literally pounding his forearm on the keyboard, is even longer than the record album version — and one of those artistic accomplishments you might “appreciate” more than you “enjoy.”

The break between early Floyd and later Floyd is starkly illustrated when the film briefly transports us to Abbey Road Studios in London, a few months following the Pompeii gig. Here we find the band noodling with downright recognizable melodies and laying down tracks for their next album, a little thing called “Dark Side of the Moon” — still among the top-selling albums of all time.

After an hour of hallucinatory mayhem in the Italian sun, snippets of “Us and Them” and the new album’s title track drift into our hears like aural honey. “More!” we beg, but the snippets fade out all too soon, yielding to an extended sequence of the band eating lunch (Mason, for some reason, keeps asking for pie “with no crust”).

Anyway, latter-day Floyd is not what we’re here for. Pink Floyd at Pompeii — MCMLXXII captures a moment that even its stars knew was about to slip into the ether of popular music history.

“People are constantly saying rock’s dying,” Gilmour observes during one of those London sessions. “Every six months, someone says it with enormous conviction.

”But, it’s not gonna happen.”

Pink Floyd’s surviving members are all in their late 70s and early 80s. As Gilmour seems to have expected 50-some years ago, none of them will outlive rock, nor the unique fusion of music and mystery they conjured both before and after those hot days under a volcano.