Many great directors are overachievers, obsessives for whom the construction of immaculately designed cinematic worlds is an extension of some intrinsic need to impose order upon entropy, or just heighten the usual experience of everyday life. Yet even among this rarified class, Martin Scorsese stands out. Brimming over with infectious energy, he applies an almost annoying level of intensity to projects other directors might use as an excuse to coast. In the case of The Last Waltz, this meant reshaping the foundations of the modern concert film via material culled from a single hectic show, bolstered by additional soundstage performance footage, extensive band interviews and a healthy amount of backstage drama.
Much of this animus stems from the way Scorsese inserted himself, perhaps unintentionally, into the Band’s actively dissolving creative partnership, choosing sides in the process. The group’s structure was always shaky, following years under the tutelage of rockabilly hustler Ronnie Hawkins with a brief stint as Levon and the Hawks, with drummer Levon Helm serving as ostensible leader. Helm departed soon after the ensemble became Bob Dylan’s backing act, only to return a few years later once they began recording on their own. From this point, the quintet grappled with the travails of touring and a power struggle between Helm and guitarist Robbie Robertson, exacerbated by mounting substance abuse issues.
It was Robertson who brought in Scorsese to direct The Last Waltz, at the suggestion of tour manager Jonathan Taplin, laying the groundwork for a creative partnership that continues to this day. The young director, hired on the strength of his usage of music in Mean Streets, set down to immortalizing what was billed as a farewell concert as an era-defining musical event. The results basically confirmed this epochal status, while the rest of the band, at least in Helm’s reckoning, saw the film as an attempt to cement a developing narrative of Robertson as the creative driving force, with his Hollywood buddy as official chronicler. These suspicions likely weren’t allayed by the fact that Robertson and Scorsese were living together during the cutting of the movie, in a Los Angeles crash pad whose manic coked-up energy would also ferment American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, the short documentary released the same year, using film stock left over from this project.
The show itself had been held on Thanksgiving 1976, at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. The then-unheard-of $25 ticket price, in addition to promising a full slate of guest stars, also included a complete turkey dinner, served three hours before the start of the show. The concert itself is a dynamic run-through of the Band’s biggest hits, with a few relevant covers added in for balance, and finds them backed by a litany of familiar faces, many connected in some way or another to their past. Allowing the group to function as sidemen on the performance of their own songs adds an interesting wrinkle to the usually static concert film aesthetic, with each new guest necessitating a shift in stage placement and instrumentation, the group dynamic constantly in flux.
Most importantly, the film is both shot and constructed with a sharp sense of creativity, utilizing coverage from multiple cameras to create a composite style that’s of a piece with the backstage documentary elements. Key also is Scorsese’s gnat-like attention to detail, which sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways. The performance from Muddy Waters, one of the movie’s standouts, was only captured because cameraman László Kovács had taken out his earpiece, tired of the director’s constant commentary and demands, and missed the order for a coordinated change of film reels. At the same time, there’s a sense of inherent chaos and randomness bleeding through the entire enterprise, as when Ringo Starr suddenly shows up out of nowhere to sit in on “I Shall Be Released”. That song, which closes the concert and also features Ronnie Wood and Bob Dylan, is one of many instances where the hierarchical nature of rock stardom is drawn into focus, while also expressing the final live testament of a band exhausted by years on the road.
Also crucial to that final performance, which culminates with most of the guest stars returning to the stage, is that Richard Manuel, who recorded vocals on the official album version, is basically nowhere to be seen, while Robertson hangs close to Dylan on the mic. While enshrining the Band’s place in the classic rock pantheon, The Last Waltz does so by relegating them to second fiddle status. The appearance of Dylan, meanwhile, stands as another happy accident, after the singer decided during intermission that he didn’t want to be included in the project after all, uneasy about how his appearance would conflict with the release of his own forthcoming movie, the famous white elephant Renaldo and Clara. This could have been disastrous, considering that a million dollars in Warner Brothers’ financing was contingent upon his appearance.
Promoter Bill Graham was eventually able to inveigle Dylan into appearing as agreed, allowing the film to stand as a monument to the wildness of the evening, rather than an incomplete document irreparably flawed by it. The frisson here, and the general air of dissolute unease which pervades the interview segments, sets the tone of personal disorder clashing with the demands of corporate spectacle, adding an undertone of dark comedy that’s as sad as it is funny. As a document, The Last Waltz is as significant a depiction of cultural transition as Gimme Shelter, and points the way toward parodic reinterpretations like This Is Spinal Tap. Befitting the slide toward overindulgence, commercialized phoniness and general bad vibes it captures, there are also moments of cathartic levity, like the pure ‘70s spectacle of a velour-clad Van Morrison pulling pitiful would-be high kicks with shameless aplomb.
The combination of shagginess and directorial fussbudgetry that marks the final product also functions as a reminder that Scorsese often does his best work while shaping discord into the type of art that retains distinct traces of that turmoil. In his recent memoir, the Lounge Lizards frontman and sometime-actor John Lurie recalls his experience working with the director on The Last Temptation of Christ, a dream come true that soured when faced with the impersonal fastidiousness of Scorsese’s methods. As with the backstage drama being utilized here, it’s a reminder that great art generally doesn’t emerge from breezy interactions, and that some measure of exploitation is often inherent to the process. Just as the Band’s sometimes-rancorous dissolution as a touring entity served as an excuse for Robertson and the promoters to cash in with an all-star cast of musical legends, the high-wire act of tying all that rock-and-roll excess into a coherent cinematic object represents a technical challenge for Scorsese himself.
Yet what has granted The Last Waltz real staying power is not just dedication to the fulfillment of those challenges, but also the ability to foreground them in moments of real emotional clarity. Not quite satisfied with the material gleaned from the concert, Scorsese went ahead and organized two additional performances, shot on a soundstage lit with colored gels, an atmosphere not unlike the opening episodes of Peter Jackson’s recent The Beatles: Get Back. In this case, a similar avenue of subtextual matter is being accessed, albeit from the opposite side; the transposition of familiar songs onto an artificial replica of the live milieu allows them to open up and breathe differently than they would on an arena stage. This is aided by the fact that both performances (“The Weight,” backed by the Staple Singers and “Evangeline,” with Emmylou Harris) are marvelous, and also that Scorsese shoots the hell out of them. As the camera winds around the stage, accessing different vantage points, a new sort of intimacy is achieved, and the disarray that leaks into many of the other scenes is dissipated. What results is a final memorial to the music itself, softening the sometimes-chaotic circumstances that fuel the creation of art into a few fleeting moments of pure transcendence.
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