DKosty123 There is a lot of history in this film. It starts with Melvin Belli representing the Rolling Stones negotiating for the concert site for the free concert. Belli is the same guy who defended Jack Ruby after he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. His conference calls to the people representing venues for this "free" concert, are interesting and attended by all the Stones. While Ike & Tina Turner do get a little concert footage in this film, the missed opportunity here is that there is no footage of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young who were also a part of the concert. The film does have the footage of a murder by the Stones hired Hells Angels Security, along with some clubbing. This is history.It is interesting that the Stones wanted to re-stage Woodstock 4 months later according to all the accounts, yet this makes no sense. Woodstock became a "free concert" but actually only after the huge crowd broke down the retaining fence. Until then, everyone there had paid to get in. The Stones decided to make the Alamont concert free from the start. There was chaos and last minute planning, which was totally different than Woodstock too.Because the concert was free, and not well planned, it turned out to be different than Woodstock. The traffic jam getting into Alamont shown must have been even worse when the crowd left. The huge crowd at Woodstock had so much trouble leaving, that an unfinished Interstate Highway, Route 17, had to be opened to let the traffic out. The music in this film is great as the Stones tour that year was the group at it's height and songs like "Brown Sugar" would become hits. Little was it known that the Stones when this was filmed, would outlast The Beatles, and most of the other musical acts featured in the concert by many years. They art still performing in 2017 which is when I am writing this. This concert music might sound a little crude compared to recording of the same songs, but live concerts technology had no where near the technology in the recording studios at this point in history. Live concerts never sounded like studios at this time. The very first live rock concert albums proved that, and the first 2 live rock concert albums were done by The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean. The albums got better after that, but too often the concerts did not have any way to create the same sound as the groups did in the studio.The amazing thing with this film, is the sequences at the end with Mick Jaggar watching the film of the murder which could have been much worse. Not revealed in the film is that the victim getting stabbed was killed because they were pulling out a gun. Without the stabbing, it can not be sure how many folks might have died if the gun man had opened up.The peace and love of Woodstock are over when this was filmed. As for free concerts, they still happen but rarely with this big named a group. As for murders at large events, they got worse after this. Crowd control at events had some major breakdowns years later where many were killed trying to leave large events.In a way, this film having killings at a concert event showed there were things to come that would make people forget this one.

tavm While I had previously seen this film on tape that I recorded off AMC, that cassette didn't record the whole thing so it wasn't until I just watched it on YouTube that I saw the murder that pretty much ended the picture. If I didn't already read about it on various internet articles, I wouldn't have known about the gun that murdered man had that he presumably intended to use on that Hell's Angel that stabbed him. This film, Gimme Shelter, is both enjoyable for the performances of The Rolling Stones and others like Ike and Tina Turner, Jefferson Airplane, and The Flying Burrito Brothers, and upsetting for all those scenes of those Hell's Angels constantly beating up on several audience members not to mention some of the musicians like Airplane's Marty Balin. And seeing Mick Jagger's face after seeing the whole thing on the view finder makes one wonder how he could have continued the way he did after that. Still, at least during those Madison Square Garden performances of The Stones and The Turners, you could marvel at the way they put themselves out there. I especially loved the way Tina stroked that microphone and its handle! And while the camera is mostly on the audience and their scuffles when the other acts are playing at Altamont Speedway, at least you can hear what they're singing when that happens. So on that note, Gimme Shelter is one of the most compelling of concert documentaries from this most interesting era in Rock music. Kudos to David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin.

Rodrigo Amaro The great thing about "Gimme Shelter" is the way this documentary works as a dramatical film with acts, thrills, and when you watch how things were at the Altamont Festival you see how difficult things were that it looks like a Hollywood film where everything happens because it was written this way in order to be appealing to audiences. The Mayles Brothers film has no script whatsoever but some of the situations presented in it seems to coming out of a intriguing suspense. The now infamous concert seems to fated from the moment where managers wanted a place to do the show until the deaths of four people during the whole thing, being the murder of Meredith Hunter as the worst presented (and the only displayed and mentioned in the film, during the Rolling Stones performance of "Under My Thumb"). Reasons for being a failure are countless: Security issues concerning that the police almost wasn't present and the Hell's Angels were the ones contracted to do the job, pushing people around and hitting Jefferson' Airplane's member Marty Balin on the face (act denounced by the band members while performing which almost caused a big clash between band and the motorcycle members); the place where the concert was made with a enormous number of people (this is the drama I was talking about, since this place was the third selected for such event, sounds like a play with three acts of tension, the third place where everything happened, things like that). Every time you can sense that something's gonna happen and it will be something bad. Everything was a mess, but you can see some happiness, some smiles in crowd, it wasn't so bad but it could have been a better event to be remembered as a nice thing.Future viewers pay attention to Rolling Stones performance in the final minutes of the film where the most gripping and shocking part appears. The band couldn't play a song without being interrupted by the crowd and then the unfortunate event of the murder of a man by the Hell's Angels who attacked the man because he had a gun. Question to be made by us viewers is: why someone carried a gun in a show and a improvised security member carried a knife with him? And despite all the planning we see Mel Belli and managers doing throughout the documentary one must wonder what happened there."Gimme Shelter" captures the 1970's hippie movement, the rock n'roll as a powerful art in that social scenery, and of course the music is great. Brilliantly edited and directed it is a bold and interesting documentary. It gets sad towards the ending (especially Mick Jagger's face viewing in details the murder that happened in front of them but in the moment they couldn't saw a thing. Thanks to one of the film editors he could see the awful truth). Rock N'Roll fans or not, see it right now! 10/10

gregory-joulin Certainly not a filmed concert, this important documentary describes, in a very sensitive and powerful way, the incredible human bestiary that rushed towards the 1969 free Rolling Stones show located on Altamont speedway, California.Complete disorganization, brutal security staff, drug abuse will turn this rock party to an awful black celebration that will lead to more than a human sacrifice : the destruction of a new kind of innocence.Often shocking and disturbing, sometimes dreadful, "Gimme shelter" brings to us not only the pictures of a riot. It makes us think about the difficulty for men to live as social animals when they're unable to repress their predator instincts. Let's finally mention the great musical first part of the film, and the quality of the direction.