George Harrison gets the Scorcese treatment

TO the fans who thought they knew him George Harrison was both omnipresent and enigmatic. Of the four members of the world’s most famous band, the Beatles, Harrison made the least effort at being a public figure, and though he shared himself in recordings as disparate as the catchy pop of “Taxman,” the desolate strains of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and an album of spiritual chants and music that he produced for the Radha Krishna Temple, he could be inscrutable and distant behind it all. Even as he sang “Got My Mind Set on You,” his consciousness seemed to be focused somewhere else entirely.

whether he was recording his first sitar lesson with Ravi Shankar or retaining fully packed suitcases from trips abroad that he kept as time capsules. But he wasn’t concerned with how posterity would regard him.

“When he used to be asked how he’d like to be remembered, he said, ‘I don’t care, I don’t care if I’m remembered,’ ” Ms. Harrison said in an interview, affectionately imitating George’s clenched Liverpool accent. “And I really think he meant that. Not in a sarcastic way, but it’s like: Why do you have to be remembered? What’s the big deal?”

These many sides of Harrison — the artist and the archivist; the mystic and the mystery — are all on display in a new documentary, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” directed by Martin Scorsese, which HBO will show in two parts on Oct. 5 and 6....