How ‘The Last Waltz’ Became One of Rock’s Greatest Docs

The director and the guitarist grew shut, particularly throughout postproduction, and fairly quickly they have been residing collectively and jetting off to events in Paris or Rome. That closeness triggered friction: Despite the approval for “The Last Waltz,” some members of the Band felt that Robertson had made the movie about him, quite than about them.

The drummer Levon Helm, whose superlatively soulful voice electrifies “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” made these criticisms public with the 1993 publication of his memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire.” He known as the film “a disaster” and accused Scorsese of creating Robertson look nice whereas ignoring different band members.

By then, Robertson and Helm had arrived at very completely different ranges of success and monetary consolation. “Robbie won. Levon lost,” Ken Gordon wrote in a 2015 essay in The Bitter Southerner. Some individuals reflexively facet with winners, others with losers, and after Helm’s e book got here out, Robertson’s fame suffered in some circles, and presumably influenced subsequent evaluations of “The Last Waltz,” particularly after it was rereleased in theaters and on DVD in 2002.

“The movie’s real subject is not the Band as a whole, but Robbie Robertson,” Stephen E. Severn wrote in Film Quarterly, including that “virtually every visual and thematic aspect of ‘The Last Waltz’ is designed to showcase his talents at the expense of the other members of the group.” Nonetheless, Severn affirms that it “may be the best film ever made about the music scene,” one which, unwittingly or not, reveals the cutthroat nature of the enterprise.

Nearly 25 years after the discharge of “The Last Waltz,” its placement on lists of the most effective music documentaries was so frequent that the consensus across the movie was ripe for a problem. “‘The Last Waltz’ has inexplicably been called the greatest rock documentary of all time,” Roger Ebert wrote in 2002. In a re-evaluation of the film that very same yr, Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times that “part of the pleasure is in watching Robbie Robertson, the group’s leader, seduce Mr. Scorsese.”

The film is extra skeptically understood now, however its stature has by no means waned. Even its stoutest opponents acknowledge its high quality. “Critics called the movie the best and most sumptuous film ever made about a rock concert,” Levon Helm wrote grumpily in his e book, “and I suppose that’s true.”