After Robertson decided that The Band was breaking up \u2013 a move he may or may or may not have cleared with his colleagues, depending on who you asked \u2013 the idea (at first) was to stage a farewell concert with a few friends. Maybe shoot a bit of it on 16mm film or black-and-white video for posterity\u2019s sake. Of course, like most notions floated by 1970s entertainers at odd hours of the morning under the influence of certain substances, it quickly ballooned out of any reasonable proportion, to a point where at the Thanksgiving Day show promoter Bill Graham was serving a sit down turkey dinner to all five thousand people in the audience. (A reported 4k lbs. of bird were harmed in the making of this picture.) Curiously, none of this makes it into Scorsese\u2019s documentary about the concert, in which the audience is barely glimpsed at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s a weird movie, The Last Waltz<\/em>. This is something that\u2019s often overlooked a lot when people herald the transcendent musical performances it features. Scorsese actually starts with the last encore at the end of the night \u2013 following a quick prologue of Danko playing pool that appears to be the filmmaker warming up for The Color of Money<\/em> nine years ahead of schedule, and an instruction to projectionists that the film is to be played LOUD. The Band re-takes the stage for the last time (\u201cYou\u2019re still here?\u201d a weary Robertson half-kids the crowd) and launches into a hard-charging locomotive cover of Marvin Gaye\u2019s \u201cBaby Don\u2019t You Do It\u201d that ends as abruptly as it began. Then they\u2019re done, the movie over before it even started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rock concert films were generally shoddy, 16mm affairs caught on the fly. Scorsese insisted on shooting The Last Waltz<\/em> on 35mm film, with a murderer\u2019s row of the industry\u2019s best cameramen (L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Kov\u00e1cs! Vilmos Zsigmond!) working under the supervision of Michael Chapman. He hired West Side Story<\/em> production designer Boris Leven, who decked out the Winterland stage with set decorations and crystal chandeliers from the San Francisco Opera House\u2019s production of La Traviata<\/em>. Scorsese turned the set list into a 200-page shooting script with precise camera movements and lighting cues keyed to the song lyrics. Even post-production was state of the art, utilizing new traveling matte technology pioneered for Star Wars<\/em> in order to conceal a large chunk of cocaine hanging from Neil Young\u2019s nostril.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A soulful and cryptically funny meditation on shared burdens, it\u2019s one of those songs that feels as if it\u2019s always been with us, like a hymn passed down through the ages. I remember being shocked to learn it was written as recently as 1968 \u2013 with Robertson taking inspiration from Luis Bunuel\u2019s Viridiana<\/em> and a bookstore owner named Fanny. The sequence features some of Scorsese\u2019s most fluid, mellifluous camerawork, as if he were harmonizing with the singers. But then, Scorsese wanting to be part of The Band is one of the strangest sources of amusement in The Last Waltz<\/em>. Hanging around all the backstage segments like somebody\u2019s excitable little brother, Scorsese\u2019s obsequious interview style was the inspiration for Rob Reiner\u2019s Marty Di Bergi character in This Is Spinal Tap<\/em>. Accentuated by his penchant for leaving bloopers and re-takes in his documentaries, there\u2019s something terribly endearing about a director being so jazzed that he gets to hang out with rock stars. And if I could have one wish for everyone in this world, it\u2019s that we all may someday find someone who looks at us the way Martin Scorsese photographs Robbie Robertson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The big complaint with The Last Waltz<\/em>, laid out rather scathingly in Levon Helm\u2019s memoir This Wheel\u2019s On Fire<\/em>, is that the film is overrun with closeups of Robbie. His billowing scarves and preening stage presence are magnets for Scorsese\u2019s camera, and for a group that prided themselves on sharing singing duties, he does almost all of the talking in the interview segments. (When the Criterion Collection Blu-ray came out last year, I quipped that it should have come with a \u201cMute Robbie\u201d option. And now I feel awful about that because he died.) Robertson was only 33 years old when the film was shot \u2013 same age as another Scorsese protagonist who pulled into Nazareth \u2013 and his constant complaining that rock n\u2019 roll is a young man\u2019s game become retroactively amusing when you realize how many performers in the movie are still touring, or at least were until relatively recently. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Robertson passed away in August at the age of 80, a musician pal of mine was told by a young person in his band that they always thought Robbie was pretentious. My friend replied, \u201cYou\u2019re fuckin\u2019 allowed to be if you played on Blonde on Blonde<\/em>.\u201d It\u2019s true. Robertson could be a camera hog and a gloryhound, but hey \u2013 he wrote \u201cThe Weight.\u201d The Last Waltz<\/em> is not a particularly informative movie if you want to learn about the history of The Band. (There\u2019s no mention at all of Big Pink, or any of those electric Dylan shows.) But that\u2019s because Robertson and Scorsese are both natural born curators, which is how they became fast friends and ultimately roommates who ingested most of the cocaine in Southern California. They\u2019re after something much grander than just the story of a band\u2026 even if it\u2019s The Band. The Last Waltz<\/em> is trying to tie in all the disparate traditions of country, gospel, blues and even Tin Pan Alley, attempting to illustrate how this music all flows together to form rock n\u2019 roll. The miracle of the movie is that it succeeds. It\u2019s like a music history class taught by instructors who are all a little zonked, and a filmmaker who adores them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Last Waltz” is streaming on MGM+<\/a>, Tubi<\/a>, Pluto TV<\/a>, and Fobu<\/a>, and is available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/last-waltz2-1024x757.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Everyone has their own favorite Last Waltz<\/em> number, whether it be Van Morrison, resplendent in his purple spangled jumpsuit, kicking the air to \u201cCaravan,\u201d or Bob Dylan howling \u201cBaby, Let Me Follow You Down\u201d like a man possessed. (He has the movie\u2019s best hat, and the competition is fierce.) The film is crammed with iconic guest stars like Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neils both Young and Diamond, Ronnie Hawkins, Emmylou Harris, Paul Butterfield, Dr. John, Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood. My personal favorite performance wasn\u2019t even shot at Winterland, but later on an MGM soundstage where, in an attempt to offset the overbearing whiteness of the concert lineup, the Staple Singers joined The Band to sing Robertson\u2019s masterpiece \u201cThe Weight.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n