Let's Waltz Again

The Last WaltzDirected by Martin Scorsese A United Artists release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

The rerelease of The Last Waltz is being touted as a 25th-anniversary event, despite that the movie was released in 1978 and the concert it documents happened in 1976. (That’s 24 and 26 years ago respectively, for the English majors in the audience.) But then, The Band was always about invented history, myth if you like, not the kind that shows up in dates or books, but its living spirit. Instead of reviving the past, they embodied it in the present tense.

As a farewell, The Last Waltz, which documents The Band's final concert -- Nov. 26, 1976, at San Francisco's Winterland -- is a bittersweet experience, not least because it contains both what made them great and why their time had passed. Martin Scorsese, who was at the time in the thick of completion on the opulent, old-style musical New York, New York, orchestrated what is arguably still the most visually rich of rock 'n' roll films: Old-school designer Boris Leven turned Winterland into a sparkling ballroom; Taxi Driver d.p. Michael Chapman lit every song to precise, lyric-by-lyric specifications, while legendary cinematographers László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond were among those content to merely operate cameras. For the concert, which stretched some five hours, The Band invited Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil Diamond, Dr. John and Eric Clapton to take the stage with them, as well as former mentors Bob Dylan and Ronnie Hawkins.

The effect is of a legend being willed into being. Robbie Robertson, The Band's guitarist and principal songwriter, had conceived the elaborate farewell as a sort of musical history lesson, paying tribute to The Band's forerunners, both real and imagined, "all the spokes in the wheel," as Robertson puts it now. Muddy Waters' authoritative rendition of "Mannish Boy" is among the film's highlights, but it's tough to hear any blues at all in The Band's music, at least when they're not backing Muddy Waters. (Following that number with a typically lifeless Eric Clapton jam shows just how quickly that authority can evaporate.) And Neil Diamond's appearance on Winterland's stage, intended to recall Roberston's visits to Tin Pan Alley as a child (and, more than likely, that he and Diamond had recently worked on an album together), simply comes off as incongruous; he looks like a representative of everything The Band's music should've wiped out.

The production's grandiose nature, Robertson recalls from Los Angeles, came somewhat by design and somewhat by surprise. Inviting the musicians, of course, was his idea, as was involving Martin Scorsese, but he had no idea to what lengths Scorsese would go, not to mention Boris Leven, who'd designed West Side Story and The Sound of Music. "With him talking about chandeliers from Gone With the Wind, we're like, ŒChandeliers, Boris? I don't know -- you know our music, you know these people. I don't know if chandeliers are supposed to be there.' And he was like, ŒPlease, this is The Last Waltz. This isn't some grimy concert somebody's throwing in a field somewhere.' Marty went to that Visconti place, and he was like, ŒOf course! You gotta have chandeliers, and you have to have a set from La Traviata' and all that. It's quite beautiful, and it works with the whole Last Waltz mood. But these things were risky things to do."

Even more than the music, the look is what really distinguishes The Last Waltz. Apart from Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense and his little-seen Storefront Hitchcock, it's hard to think of another performance film that aims to be more than a seat-of-the-pants documentary. The Last Waltz has its share of memorable unplanned moments, like the road-worn camaraderie invoked when Young switches microphones to sing along with Robertson and Rick Danko at the close of "Helpless," or the impromptu guitar duel between Clapton and Robertson -- which gets its start when Clapton's guitar strap detaches just as he's about to go into his solo, forcing Robertson to fill in. But Scorsese also storyboarded every song lyric by lyric and player by player, allowing for such haunting images as Danko, isolated by a halo of light, recalling the ravages of the road in "Stage Fright."

Apart from Robertson, the rest of The Band -- Danko, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson -- had little to do with the planning of the film, and even Robertson went more on instinct than understanding. "None of us really had a handle on it," he says. "I just got to know Scorsese better [than the others], so I was very comfortable just following his instincts. It was like, this is what he does, he does it really well. That guy over there? He sings ŒMannish Boy.' He does it really well. However he wants to sing it, I'm gonna go with that. However this guy wants to set up a camera, I'm gonna go with that."

That sense of collaboration is one of the things that made The Band unique, which is why it does them no disservice to observe that many of the film's best performances (and those on the soundtrack album, now expanded to a 4-CD boxed set) are sung by other musicians. It's also why they had three lead singers, and why Robertson's post-breakup self-aggrandizement still leaves a slightly sour taste. (The DVD, due out in May, includes two commentaries, one with Scorsese and Robertson called "The Musician and the Filmmaker" the other a hodgepodge including reminiscences from the two other surviving members of The Band, called "The Band and Others.")

It's particularly to Scorsese's credit, then, that even those performances that sound overstuffed on record don't on film. Backed by his larger-than-life images, the myths come alive, take wing, in a way that they've since ceased to do, for The Band and for Scorsese. But for as long as you're watching, you still believe.

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