DVD/Blu-ray review: 'Charlie is My Darling' - Ireland 1965

In celebration of the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary, ABKO Films has unearthed the long lost “Charlie is My Darling,” a 1965 documentary treasure chronicling the band’s

Directed by British documentarian Peter Whitehead in what he called a “socio-realistic cinema verite” style, the black-and-white film captures the future bad boys of rock when they were very young and still relatively innocent, playing the biggest available venues in Ireland at the time — movie theaters — and looking bewildered and even a little bit frightened when screaming girls and boys rush the unprotected stage and mob them in the middle of grinding out “It’s Alright.”

The band’s then 19-year-old manager Andrew Loog Oldham commissioned the film, in his words, as “sort of a trial run, get-your-celluloid legs together for any forthcoming feature film and an effort on my part to keep the Stones interested in the idea of film.” He was obviously dreaming of a Stones version of “A Hard Day’s Night” and the box office millions that it could suck in. 

Curiously, “Charlie is My Darling” — named affectionately for the aloof, no-nonsense Stones drummer Charlie Watts — was never publicly released until now.

In the film, it’s quite apparent that the man for whom it was named was the least enthusiastic of anyone about having a camera trained on him.

“I’m just a drummer,” Watts mumbles to an interviewer at one point with a faintly amused little smile. “I’m not a musician of (classical) caliber … maybe it’s just an inferiority complex. Maybe I’m great after all.”