Gimme Shelter

Just rereleased on video, Gimme Shelter may be the greatest rock film ever made; it’s certainly the most frightening. Mick Jagger hoped the 1969 free concert at California’s Altamont Speedway would be ”a microcosmic society which sets an example to the rest of America.” A cynic might say he got his wish: Altamont became the anti-Woodstock when the Maysles brothers’ cameras caught one of the Hell’s Angels hired for crowd control in the act of killing a bystander. The scene in which Jagger pleads for the fighting throng to ”be all one,” then cues the band into the spiteful ”Under My Thumb,” hints at what went wrong — with the concert in particular and the ’60s in general. A+