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Movie Review: 'Lambert & Stamp'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- If someone mentions The Who and your only response is, "Who?," then this movie's not for you. Ditto if someone then mentions Tommy and you say, "Tommy who?"

If, on the other hand, you have an appreciation for one of the twentieth century's most legendary and influential rock bands, a big chunk of what came to be called the British Invasion (led by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones) of the sixties and early seventies, then this documentary, good or bad, is aimed right at your generation.

Lambert & Stamp is a documentary about the "fifth and sixth members" of The Who, the wildly successful rock band featuring lead singer Roger Daltrey, guitarist Peter Townshend, bassist John Entwistle, and drummer Keith Moon.

2
(2 stars out of 4)

Both Kit Lambert, the aristocratic, Oxford-educated, gay son of famous composer Constant Lambert, and Chris Stamp, the straight, street-tough, Cockney son of a tugboat captain and the younger brother of actor Terence Stamp (who is one of the interviewees), are tellingly interviewed, as are the group's survivors, Daltrey and Townshend.

A funny thing happened to the titular odd couple on their way to becoming French-New Wave-influenced filmmakers: they came across a band called The High Numbers playing as part of the Mod subculture in clubs in swinging London.

So they figured to make a film about the quartet. But instead, even though they had absolutely no experience in the music business, the wannabe documentarians and creative hustlers became the group's producers and managers.

And the group came to be poster boys for teenagers' rebellion, with songs like "My Generation" and "I Can't Explain" on young people's tongues. Suddenly, Lambert and Stamp were a big part of the music scene, with single after single cracking the Top Ten.

Debuting director James D. Cooper mixes lots and lots of talking-head interviews, a few concert clips, and extensive archival footage to tell the background stories of the rock revolution and more specifically The Who. But their foreground story is the unlikely partnership of the late Stamp and Lambert.

And that artistic decision – to bring the behind-the-scenes guys front and center and push the performers off to the side -- undercuts the film's impact. Frankly, we have much more interest in the musicians than their invisible puppeteers.

So there's a certain amount of disenfranchising of the general audience, as opposed to diehard Who fans, who may well grow impatient with this approach as they yearn for a greater sampling of actual performance footage.

Bottom line: the more you already know about The Who coming in, the more obliquely interesting and watchable this doc.

Which is why we'll rock 2 stars out of 4 for Lambert & Stamp, a less-than-wizardly documentary that we wish offered up more of the what, the where, the when, the why, and the how of The Who.

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