Butler's Cinema Scene

Chris Stamp, Kit Lambert

“LAMBERT & STAMP” My rating: B- 

117 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The new doc “Lambert & Stamp” makes the case that Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert were pivotal figures in post-war pop culture.

Never heard of them? Not surprising.  They weren’t performers. But as the managers of The Who these two Brits exerted a powerful influence on that band and triggered ripples that affected much more.

Stamp (who’s still with us) and Lambert (who died in 1981 in a downward drug spiral) were unlikely soulmates.

Stamp was a workingclass bloke who took a job as a stagehand for a ballet company because he’d been told (by his brother, actor Terence Stamp) that it would be a great way to meet women.

Lambert was the posh, Oxford-educated son of a famous classical musician. He could converse in several languages and was more or less openly gay at a time when homosexuality was a crime. (He bears more than a little resemblance to Brian Epstein, the wildly creative but doomed manager of  The Beatles.)

Both young men were obsessed with self expression and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Both had worked a variety of jobs in the English film industry and were looking for subject matter they could tackle as their directing debuts.

They glommed onto Britain’s fashion-savvy and musically aware mod scene, and in particular a struggling rock quartet called the High Numbers (soon to be rechristened The Who).  Their idea was to manage the band — neither knew anything about the music business — and make a documentary about how they had molded the group into a pop phenomenon.

The movie never got made.  The Who, however, became one of the greatest bands in rock.

James D. Cooper’s doc is jammed with wonderful grainy footage and photos of the mod/rocker era and of The Who’s earliest gigs. The soundtrack is filled with different takes of familiar Who tunes. There are interviews with guitarist Pete Townsend and singer Roger Daltrey (the band’s two surviving members), Stamp and other participants in the mod scene.

There are some interesting revelations here. Townsend says that at the time he assumed the music wouldn’t last for more than a year or two, that it would “deliberately blow itself up.” (That attitude found voice in his anarchistic feedback and the guitar-smashing ritual that ended most gigs.)

Initially Stamp and Lambert felt that only front man Daltrey and drummer Keith Moon were charismatic enough to meet their requirements for stardom. Townsend and John Entwistle were deemed too gawky and ugly.  Thoughts of replacing them were quickly shelved, though, when it became apparent that Townsend was a great songwriter and that Entwistle was probably the most innovative bassist in rock.

It was Lambert who suggested that Daltrey stutter on his vocal for “My Generation” (because it perfectly summed up the struggle of youth to make itself heard), and who insisted that The Who’s  “Tommy” should comment on post-war British society (Townsend originally planned his rock opera as a fairly uncomplicated spiritual allegory).

Stamp and Lambert went on to manage the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Jimi Hendrix, both acts that offered a heady mix of music and performance art.  The two managers and The Who parted ways in the mid-70s.

Yes, there’s much good stuff in “Lambert and Stamp.” Christopher Tellefsen’s editing is a character unto itself.

But at nearly two hours the film feels bloated and repetitive. And at the risk of sounding thankless, I found myself far less interested in the travails of Lambert and Stamp than in the four members of The Who.

| Robert W. Butler