This grim 1970 film by David and Albert Maysles documents the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California, where one spectator was stabbed to death by the Hell’s Angels. It’s been widely applauded as a more truthful look at the counterculture than Woodstock offered earlier that year, but Woodstock is a great film and Gimme Shelter, despite some great Stones footage, is crippled by its rhetorical pretensions. As Dave Kehr wrote in his original Reader capsule, The film is a strong example of the cinema verite style at work, yet few films of the school show up the crisis of its ‘noninvolvement’ policy more tellingly. There is a horrible sense of helplessness as the Maysleses’ camera looks on while the Hell’s Angels stab an unruly fan to death, and the implications of hippie fascism contained in that image are not meaningfully developed in light of the film’s own excessive idolization of Jagger and company. The camera that looks up too easily looks down. 91 min. (JR)