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.
Butler's Cinema Scene 