THE THREE-REELIN' BOB DYLAN

THE THREE-REELIN’ BOB DYLAN: The Cinematic Legacy of Bob Dylan


During a pivotal scene in Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac 1973 Western, ‘Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid’, Billy (Kris Kristoferson) turns to a ragamuffin young stranger with piercing blue eyes, who has just dispatched an enemy with a well-aimed knife, and inquires his name.

“Alias,” the stranger responds laconically.

“Alias what?”

“Alias anything you please.”

The enigmatic ‘Alias’ is none other than Bob Dylan in one of his infrequent film appearances, and the brief scene pretty much encapsulates Dylan’s eclectic and problematic film career. Happy 69th birthday today to Robert Zimmerman . . 'alias' Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s influence as a songwriter cannot be overstated. As a film presence – either as actor, writer, director or documentary subject – he’s no Olivier or Welles. But he is always strangely beguiling.

‘Pat Garrett’ wasn’t Dylan’s acting debut. While visiting England in 1963, the 22-year-old waif with the Woody Guthrie cap was improbably cast as a student in an original BBC drama, ‘The Madhouse on Castle Street’. He had trouble remembering his lines and hitting marks. By the time the show aired, Dylan’s dialogue had been reduced to one line which, characteristically, he mumbled. However, he did debut a new composition at the top of the show, a promising effort called ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.

Two years later, he had evolved from Guthrie wannabe to world-famous pop star and had found the one role he could convincingly essay: A pampered, vitriolic troubadour named Bob Dylan. Documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker accompanied Dylan on a three-week tour of England in 1965. The result was one of the most influential examples of cinema verite ever released, ‘Don’t Look Back.’

Dylan is ‘on’ throughout, in rare form, cryptically charismatic, verbally sparring with fans, fellow musicians and flummoxed journalists. Two sequences have become legendary” his pre-show encounter with a young science student (who would later become president of Chrysalis Records) and a lacerating exchange with a clueless reporter from Time magazine. (“Do you believe in the words you sing?” “You’ve got a lot of nerve to ask me that, man.”)

‘Don’t Look Back’ remains a fascinating time capsule and revealing portrait of the young, petulant and posing artist-in-transition. The recently released DVD version contains 5 additional audio tracks and, on a separate disc, additional footage.

Around the time the film was released, Dylan re-invented himself (again), trading in his unadorned acoustic guitar for an electric sound that splintered his old fan base. It all came to a head in his legendary performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he appeared for the first time with a backup band, and was reportedly booed off the stage by indignant fans.

Astoundingly, film footage of this cultural flashpoint exists in Murray Lerner’s little-seen documentary, ‘Festival’ (1967). Dylan’s backup band, assembled only hours before, is rag-tag and sloppy, but the tension in the air is palpable. Dylan is inscrutable, seemingly oblivious to the chaos he’s causing among the crowd as he careens into ‘Maggie’s Farm’. This footage, along with Dylan’s earlier Newport performances, appears in the fascinating 2006 DVD release, ‘The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan At Newport’.

Dylan’s most visible film appearances have largely been as a guest musician in other people’s films, most notably in George Harrison’s ‘Concert for Bangla Desh’ (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s elegant documentary of the Band’s farewell concert, ‘The Last Waltz’ (1978.) Though ‘The Last Waltz’ is by far the better film, Dylan’s performance in ‘Bangladesh’ is the more dramatic and impressive of the two. His delicate ‘Just Like A Woman’ is luminescent, and he revisits ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, a song he had not performed live since 1964.

PART II

In the mid-70s, his marriage falling apart, Dylan embarked on his mammoth and mythic ‘Rolling Thunder Revue Tour’, and decided to film a fictionalized account of the event. Partway through the tour and filming, his wife, Sara Lowndes Dylan, showed up, and the film became an improvised, existentialist home movie that skirted a little too close to broken home for comfort – with Sara and Dylan’s ex-lover Joan Baez playing variations on the ‘Madonna/whore’ theme, with Dylan as the man in between. Dylan directed and financed; the result proved the old saying that a man who produces his own movie has a fool for a director. Called ‘Renaldo and Clara’ (1978), the film was a virtually impenetrable four-hour pastiche of amateurish-improv, heavy-handed symbolism and occasional music (a live rendition of ‘Isis’ is especially riveting). After receiving scathing reviews, Dylan edited the film down to a more tolerable 2 hours, to no particular avail.

Eleven years later, he mumbled his way through an awkward and self-conscious performance as an elder rock statesman caught in a ménage-a-trois in the abysmal ‘Hearts of Fire’ (1989). By then, Dylan’s photogenic, youthful charisma was a thing of the past – but he was still the best thing in this Joe Eszterhas-penned stinker, which was not even released in U.S. theaters. Asked later about the film, Dylan deadpanned, “Yeah, I think that came out. It was called ‘Citizen Kane’.”)

Since the failures of ‘Renaldo and Clara’ and ‘Hearts of Fire’, Dylan has been understandably wary of the camera. He showed up for a blink-and-you-miss-it 50-second cameo as an artist in Dennis Hopper’s ‘Backtrack’ (1989), and sat for a brief interview for the BBC documentary, ‘Getting to Dylan’ (1989), but cinematic sighting proved scarce throughout the 80s and 90s. Off-screen, however, Dylan’s movie scores garnered accolades. In 1998, Garth Brooks recorded a much-admired version of ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ for the ‘Hope Floats’ soundtrack, and in 2000 Dylan’s contribution to ‘Wonder Boys’, ‘Things Have Changed’, earned him an Oscar. It was the first Academy Award for the otherwise much-honored singer – and, one suspects, the last.


Next birthday, in PART III . . . Dylan’s return to the movies in ‘Masked and Anonymous’, Scorsese and Dylan, Richard Gere as Bob Dylan, and more . . .