Pink Floyd at Pompeii (1972)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

One of Those Days

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

When I first encountered Pink Floyd, they scared me... in a good way. Their album art was quietly, eerily nightmarish, from the pigs floating in a smog-filled sky on Animals to whatever the hell that thing is on the front of Meddle (note: it's a close-up of an ear). Then there were their song titles that had only the tiniest suggestion of menace or threat, ranging from "Careful with that Axe, Eugene," to "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" and "The Gold It's in the..." Actually listening to the music went one further. The 23-minute "Echoes," from Meddle, has spooked me more than once.

The biggest disappointment about the 1972 concert movie Pink Floyd at Pompeii (subtitled with a MCMLXXII) — which, in 2025, has been restored in 4K and will be shown in IMAX theaters — is that it's so... not scary. It's more hippie-ish, with lots of swirly camera effects, more like something you'd see in Woodstock than in the fevered minds of this band. Perhaps the scariest thing in it is all the shirtless men, unafraid of baking in the Italian sun (times were different).

Thankfully, that's my only complaint. Otherwise, this is a very cool movie that gives a glimpse at this band from a unique angle. They're more human here than they are ghosts or spirits. Watching them jam is a thing of beauty. The movie is set at the ancient Roman amphitheatre, and no audience is invited for this show. No one is there but the band's crew and the camera crew (all white men, unfortunately). It begins as someone hauls out a huge gong and sets it up in the center.

After an instrumental intro number called "Pompeii," the band launches into "Echoes," which is split up into two parts. (The second part concludes the show.) Seeing the band actually playing the song, Nick Mason on drums, Richard Wright on keyboards, David Gilmour on bass, and Roger Waters on guitar, significantly lessens its creep factor, and it just becomes a long, amazing jam. Those are followed by "Careful with that Axe, Eugene," "A Saucerful of Secrets," "One of These Days," "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," and a song called "Mademoiselle Nobs," which is something similar to "Seamus," the howling-dog song from Meddle. "Echoes Pt. 2" is the finale.

In-between jams, we get some behind-the-scenes footage of the band and crew having breakfast and chatting (there are some on-camera interviews), but best of all, we get to see some footage of the band tweaking three songs from their then-upcoming The Dark Side of the Moon: "On the Run," "Us & Them," and "Brain Damage." These sequences are truly a treat, a nice compare-and-contrast between the band's live abilities and their studio prowess, especially on such a masterpiece of a record.

Overall, Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII runs only 85 minutes, and it was clearly conceived as a piece of cinema, to be enjoyed on a screen, which is not something that filmmakers regularly thought about back then; usually a filmed concert was just a filmed concert. (Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme continued to take a more cinematic approach to filming live music with their The Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense). It shows a band about to do great things, and with enough creativity and showmanship to pull off some really good things.