By this point in is post-Warner Brothers Termite Terrace cartoon career, Tashlin had all but erased the animator’s pencil lines separating drawings and live action anyway, and this may be his crowning act of rendering the difference between the two irrelevant. With its convenient but boldly sketched setting in the ad game, insistence on packaging as the universal principle of successful consumption, and knuckle headed Billy Wilder framing of rock & roll as a gangster’s playground, the movie is as high on pure pop fumes as it is convinced of its own irredeemable trashiness. It would be dangerously subversive if it weren’t also so damned irresistibly fun, a triple-layered, pink-frosted cake for the having and eating too.

Despite having been turned down by Elvis — the Colonel having his own notions about movies and marketing — whose career that year was cresting definitively toward the epoch-changing stratosphere, Tashlin makes more than the most out of the available jukebox talent, including Little Richard (eyes rolled upward in electrified transfiguration), Abbey Lincoln (a strip of crimson — in a dress on loan from Guys and Dolls — sparkling against a blue velvet curtain); Gene Vincent (howling from a second story recording studio window); a hallucinated, sheerly transparent Julie London reclining on satin sheets; and Eddie Cochran ripping through 20 Flight Rock on a tiny black and white TV screen.

While most if not every one of these performances is a cinematic eye-bonbon, they’re also uniformly mediated as framed and fully packaged goods for the taking, entirely sealed off from any organic interaction with even the nominal plot, but functioning as a kind of fully effective bodysnatching conformity supplement nevertheless. (It’s also worth noting that the movie’s ‘live’ performances, in the nightclubs and recording studios and such, are easily ignored by the characters busy working the script, but anything on TV freezes rap attention. So much for incitement to revolt.) As patently exciting and expressively exploitable as the music is, it nevertheless renders its teenage masses visibly bovine and dumbstruck, oblivious even to the ad-man’s hand waved literally in front of their face. (The other hand is presumably picking the kids’ pockets.) New opiate, same old masses: the next generation will be as ripe for the suckering as any other. Although an indispensable touchstone of mid-’50s pop cultural trash compacting, The Girl Can’t Help It is most definitely not buying what it’s selling. (20th Century Fox)

Goodman had been cast in the movie as himself mostly because the studio saw one of those routine opportunities to fold a radio show’s popularity — in this case, NBC’s weekly three-hour Let’s Dance — into a movie to both lure wireless listeners and drive disc sales. But the lineups Hollywood Hotel started generating at the nation’s box office made Goodman think maybe Hammond was on to something after all. Maybe Carnegie Hall wasn’t just a freak show publicity stunt. Maybe people were ready to take this swing business uptown. In January 1938, just a few months after Hollywood Hotel was released, Goodman and the band would make a bit of sonic history — and nail at least one possible start of the swing era — by doing for Carnegie Hall what they’d done for that studio mockup of the Orchid Room.

It’s easy to underestimate the impact of the sequence watching Hollywood Hotel from any historical distance. The fact that it sits so deeply embedded in a movie that’s really about what happens when mid-western sax man and warbler Dick Powell wins a talent contest and a ten-week studio contract — duh: he falls in love and sings his heart out — suggests it wasn’t intended to ring any bells, and the fact Berkeley, the pioneering choreographer who found a transcendent new cinematic form for shooting dance numbers, shoots the Orchid Room sequence with such matter-of-fact unfussiness echoes the impression. But there was no containing that music, and if anything the absence of anything standing in the way between it and us — Goodman and band play directly to the camera, with Berkeley mostly cutting on instrumental solos and reserving his modest stylistic intervention to tilted angles on rows of blasting horns and tapping feet — simply lets the tide roll in and over with full force. Plus we get to watch something that’s almost as captivating and irresistible as the music: not only are these guys clearly and without a doubt really playing — you can practically feel the floor pulsating beneath them — they’re really digging the noise they’re making. Even the normally taciturn Goodman can’t keep from smiling over how good he knows this is. Krupa and Hampton are virtual heat generators in combat, and watch closely as the rest of the band sits grinning and foot-tapping between blasts of instruments. That they’re digging it so much only makes it that much harder for us not to. Even they can’t believe the sound they’re making. And that ending, when Goodman steps off the stage saying “All right boys, that’s all. And don’t forget let’s be on time tonight,” is as understated an epochal post-performance quip as John Lennon’s Apple Corps rooftop sign-off thirty some years on: “I would like to say thank you on behalf of the band and I hope we passed the audition.” Timing is one thing these guys do not need any help with.

Inspired by Louella Parsons’ radio show of the same name — the grand dame of Tinseltown gossip appears, inevitably and imperiously, playing Herself in the movie — Hollywood Hotel is among the hundreds of musicals made in the decade following The Jazz Singer, the era that confirmed American pop music’s destiny as a visual medium that needed to be seen as much as heard — ergo the early, irreversible and mutually dependent merging of radio and movies during the Depression — confirmed Berkeley himself as a visionary prophet of the new era and radio the real pipeline of American pop culture’s energy and vitality. Only talking for a decade, and movies were already singing (and now swinging) as though their life depended on it. Which it very likely did. After all was done and said, talking was only an incidental attraction. What really confirmed and propelled the triumph of sound in movies was music.

If you want to accuse Hollywood Hotel of being rather rumpled wrapping around the Orchid Room sequences — there’s another, later, on-the-air one, but it never ignites quite like that ‘rehearsal’ — then it’s only guilty of something so many music-driven movies were over the decades, from The Girl Can’t Help It to Girls! Girls! Girls!, or The Student Prince to Purple Rain, which is failing to find a so-called dramatic framework that provided anything like adequate support for the music we’d really come to see (and, almost incidentally, hear). But this accusation itself fails, as it presumes the music ever really needed adequate dramatic support to justify its presence or attraction. If we came to see Elvis, who truly gave a shit that he happened to be playing the same guy in this movie that he was in that last Elvis movie last month? And as wonderful as it happened to be that A Hard Day’s Night just happened to be so brilliant and innovative and thoroughly of an organic pop piece with the Beatles’ music and persona, would it ultimately have mattered to the fans of the moment if it hadn’t? Ultimately, its landmark status as a work of pop art is just one of those whimsical frills of industry.

If you watch all of Hollywood Hotel, you’ll be treated to no shortage of other period-specific, variously arcane diversions as it engages in this enduring process of trying to find a reason to exist apart from the music: a remarkably fresh Ronald Reagan appears as a radio host with an already Presidential crown of hair; the former Three Stooges’ boss Ted Healy is seen mere months following his fatal beating in a Hollywood bar fight; the makeup maestro Perc Westmore applies his trade during the movie’s most Berkeley-esque montage sequence; and the era’s fundamentally conflicted racial attitudes are almost surreally evident in the fact that the same movie can feature not only one of the very first integrated big bands — Goodman’s — but also a cringingly unfunny blackface routine on the set of a Hollywood plantation epic in-the-making. So trust me, there’s reason to stick around both before and after the rehearsal if you need one. Otherwise, be satisfied with that alone: four minutes of the future making itself seen and heard. (Warner Home Video)

When asked in late ’78 by Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone what he made of the critical pile-on occasioned by the release of Renaldo and Clara, a four year in the making, self-directed home movie blending bits of verité documentary, semi-improved backstage drama, and performance culled from the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue  tour, Dylan didn’t so much bristle as snap: “Look, just one time I’d like to see any one of those assholes try and do what I do. Just once let one of them write a song to show how they feel and sing it in front of ten, let alone 10,000 or 100,000 people. I’d like to see them just try that one time.”

And that from the Dylan of his born-again Christian phase. The words came after Renaldo and Clara, in its original, four-hour incarnation, had sunk like Atlantis following a brief release following its Cannes debut, and a second cut, pared mostly to the performance material, didn’t exactly bob long on the surface either. Dylan had pulled the movie from release in both forms, and hasn’t budged since: about the only way to see Renaldo and Clara in anything close to original form today is on a bootleg DVD made from the film’s single broadcast on British TV in 1983, and the two hour cut appears to have gone the way of Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse.

As close to an object of religious veneration and contemplation as any pop singer ever was, Dylan has been scrutinized, interpreted, pondered and polished near as much as Jesus, and it’s true Jesus has never been that adequately represented in the movies either. But it’s also true Jesus never made his own movie, let alone Renaldo and Clara. (It may also bear consideration here that the one testimonial on Charles Foster Kane that Citizen Kane elects to omit is Charles Foster Kane’s. When the legend becomes autobiography, fact is a goner.) There’s also truth in the suggestion that traits like mystery and charisma, those things that tend to invite awe, veneration and devotion, are best left to the beholder. Self-ascribed, like humility, genius or beauty, they invariably shrink into ego. As a projection of profundity or enigma, Dylan performs splendidly: watch him in Dont Look Back or No Direction Home and marvel at the man’s shambolic insecurity. Watch him play himself as imponderable whatzit in Garrett, Document, Masked and Anonymous or R&C, and shrink from the man’s all to unmysterious determination to write the script of his own gospel according to himself. If there was ever a point where the one messiah parts with the other so indisputably, this is it.

There is, for this viewer anyway, a thin line between interminable and unwatchable, and Renaldo and Clara didn’t cross it. Watched in three chunks, it might have been the former but never the latter. I wish I could concur with some of the film’s more fervent supporters say the movie’s a misunderstood masterwork, but it’s not. And it’s failures are, for me anyway, as front and centre as Dylan is on stage with the Revue. The dramatic sequences, notoriously conceived on the fly after Dylan rejected Sam Shepard’s initial script, are ineptly performed and pointlessly obtuse, suspending their performers more often than in single shot long takes that only make the discomfort of the proceedings that much more wincingly uncomfortable. The various strands of documentary material, which range from passages about Indigenous rights and rituals to Rueben Carter’s campaign for exoneration on murder charges, may have moments of fleeting clarity and force, but never speak to each other, let alone the rest of the film, as cumulative associative elements in a coherent whole. Dylan’s visit to Kerouac’s grave with Ginsberg is a fully-fledged, moving and meaningful short in itself, and Pinball Wizard David Blue’s extended reminiscence of the early Village folk days is funny, fascinating and insightful, but also adrift in this vast expanse of free-form, without-a-paddle aimlessness. And although the compromise concert-movie cut of the movie now seems vanished entirely, the instinct to reduce the movie to its concert highlights, which include renditions of Isis, It Ain’t Me, Babe and, especially, the close-up, white-mask rendition of Tangled Up in Blue, are as good as any live performances Dylan has ever allowed to be caught on camera.

But if you can bring two conditional viewing requirements to the movie — a generous fascination with Dylan and an appreciation of the movie’s historical context — Renaldo and Clara does attain a certain propulsive fascination. As a Dylan document, the film reveals much about the man’s idea of himself and his art, and the constant struggle — far more pointedly explored and articulated in music than film, at least for this artists — to both elude external attempts to label and define him and label and define himself, which might actually amount to something if Dylan’s version of himself amounted to more than asserting his ultimate unknowability, a presumption that winds its way through the movie from the plastic mask we first see him hiding behind to the kabuki whiteface he sports in concert, the almost-funny casting of the hulking Ronnie Hawkins as ‘Bob Dylan’, and the consistent presence of Dylan himself as possibly the vaguest and most anonymous member — offstage anyway — of the entire troupe. It’s like watching something somebody with the power and influence to do anything he wanted made simply because he could, and I do believe that’s exactly what it is. But Bob Dylan making a career out of being evasive, amorphous and existentially self-regarding in music and verse is one thing, and the thing he does best. Seeing him do it on film is like listening to Picasso attempt folk music.

As for context, I’d submit the following frames for consideration. First of all, there’s Dylan’s development as an artist and consciousness in the era of experimental, art and cinema verité cinemas, all of which were critical modernist forms in Dylan’s formative years. No wonder he felt an affinity and attraction to the cinema, as it seemed so organically enmeshed in the same process of busting through the walls of perception and convention that his music was. There is also the ambient influence of New Hollywood all over Renaldo and Clara — a shaggy-assed, hippie-grandiose, spiritually scatterbrained Dennis Hopper production in everything but the presence of the madman himself — and in this regard one can’t help but be tantalized by the story that Dylan nearly dropped out of appearing in Scorsese’s The Last Waltz because he didn’t want to compete with what he hoped would be the box office vitality of his own movie, or that the New Hollywood avatar Scorsese himself would be the one to pull something like a narrative out of Dylan’s life and cryptic testimonials with No Direction Home. Dylan, the filmmaker, was a creature of an age of indulgence, innovation and the untethered ego. But he was also no filmmaker.

Consider also that the year was 1978. (At least the year of the movie’s release and cultural context.) Scorsese himself had helped inaugurate the era of New Hollywood armageddon with New York, New York, a movie both brilliant and out of control, and only one of many that would bring the brief and singularly exceptional range-roaming of popular, studio-backed movies to a screeching halt. The day of the indulged movie brat was about to end, the recess bell rung. Soon would follow Apocalypse Now, 1941, Popeye and the definitive terminus of — knock, knock, knockin’ — Heaven’s Gate, which would feature at least three of Dylan’s cinematic cohorts: Kris Kristofferson, Ronnie Hawkins and David Mansfield. These movies were all made by brilliant people without brakes or much sense of direction home. As a spectacular failure of art, commerce, restraint and judgement, this is the historical moment in which Renaldo and Clara might be most at home. (Bootleg)

The Jazz Singer has so often been patronized as hopelessly dated and clumsy it’s easy to overlook just how powerfully and intensely director Alan Crosland conveys the fundamental magnetism of Alan Jolson’s performance style in this sequence, and the impact the choices made in the synching of song, singer and camera placement made on the history of movies from that instant forward. When Jakie steps up on stage and a close-up or two reassures us this is actually Al Jolson, the most popular singer of his day, the camera holds back on his full body. We’re roughly in position of the best seat in the house, but the angle would more correctly have us standing just a few feet directly in front of Jolson, the better to have him perform just for us without anything to distract or impede our appreciation of the man giving his whole being — body and soul as the saying goes — to the song. It’s exactly where you want to be to see and judge if the audition is a winner, and it’s exactly where you’d previously only dreamed of being for a real-live Jolson performance. Al Jolson, already legendary for the no holds barred physicality of his live shows, is about to do it just for you.

The song, an ode to a sloppy tyke sung by a loving parent, may be pure hokum, but hokum was Jolson’s metier, and the sentiment expressed provides the performer with the necessary emotional urgency to put his whole body into the act of selling his feelings: pleading for our empathetic investment of our feelings to match his, Jolson repeatedly extends his arms and clasps his hands in a gesture of gathering his audience into a kind of mass hug, looks upward in supplicant joy and pivots slightly on legs that seem coiled to spring, and uses his hips as the swivelling core of his entire physical channelling of the music. His body is functioning both as a form of spectacle for us watch but a kind of machine to convince us of his sincerity in the song and need for us to believe it and feel it along with him. I mean, this guy really, really wants us to like him, and, if he hasn’t done that yet, he cranks the machinery up right after his signature threat of more pleasure to come: “Folks, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” Then it’s ‘Toot Toot Tootsie’ and the world might as well be his. Darned if a wall or two hasn’t been knocked down in the few minutes it takes Jakie to sing those two numbers, and damned if you can’t see a path leading all the way to Memphis and Elvis Presley through the rubble.

If you didn’t ‘get’ Jolson before seeing that back in ’27, it’s a fair guess you might now, because here was the proof that you had to see it to believe it, and what The Jazz Singer did was provide proof, incontrovertible and irreversible, that the seeing and the hearing was how Jolson needed to be fully appreciated. But if the movies now seemed to strive in a evolutionary technological way to deliver us Al Jolson and a deliver us to Al Jolson, they also seemed to attain another kind of destiny: they were about to shift popular music itself into a visual medium. After this, there would be no hearing without seeing. From this moment forward, your eyes demanded what your ears were hearing.

In the movie’s slam-it-home penultimate performance, Jolson — in the blackface that was not only his signature style but a popular visual code for a particular kind of exceedingly sentimental and racially white and black musical performance style (the glitter of its day), Jolson is seen on a stage that has a runway into the audience: the better to get him in intimate performative proximity to his own mammy when he falls on one knee during ‘Mammy’, but also to bring the singer to the audience so they can see him as well as hear him. This too was a Jolson staple — and later a fixture of stadium rock performance — a means by which the singer’s physical presence could be made more visually accessible to his audience, and the theatrical real-world precursor of what The Jazz Singer provided virtually, in two dimensions but with sound.

For their first few years, the talkies were really jukebox song delivery systems: musicals were churned out at such a heedless rate they exhausted audience demand before the ’30s were spent, but their revival in the ’40s, not to mention the unprecedented multi-media dominion of Bing Crosby and the ritual multi-purposing of popular radio and wax recording stars as movie stars, were indications of the new world made inevitable by The Jazz Singer: pop music was, and remains, a visual medium, and the coming of sound to movies needed something to sing about to stick.  Indeed, pop music would increasingly evolve as a visual medium in the coming decades, until the rise of rock & roll — another music medium that siphoned and melded racial influences — provided the first fully-formed visual pop music form. Whatever one makes of The Jazz Singer in terms of its archaic racial signifiers, shameless sentimentality or songs whose mass popularity suggests life on another planet, the fact is this: we’re now living in the world this movie created.

Note: the 2007 triple-disc DVD edition of The Jazz Singer still stands as one of the most exhaustively essential archives of early sound technology, especially as it evolved for the purpose of recording music as a moving picture medium, available anywhere. Apart from the dozens of Vitaphone shorts featuring mostly forgotten and soon to be obliviated Vaudeville acts doing their thing, the disc also features Jolson’s amazing but hardly uncomplicated all-blackface Vitaphone short ‘A Plantation Act’, where the singer not only showcases the full range of his astounding physicality before a camera a full year prior to The Jazz Singer, he demonstrates just how thoroughly the minstrel tradition provided the most accommodating context for Jolson’s extraordinary slaying power as a sentimental belter. However we may regard the form’s reasonably uncomfortable and antiquated conventions today, the indispensably influential and popular minstrel medium gave Jolson the generic context he needed to become Al Jolson. (Warner Home Video)

So let’s consider the movie as history, at least of a sort. As Bill gregariously spins his life yarn for those kids on the studio porch, he begins with his return home from the First World War, where he meets (and dances) with the caramel-sweet and gorgeous singer Selina Rogers (Lena Horne, Robinson’s junior by some four decades), ends up travelling north after a minstrel show sting and waiting juke-joint tables, and ultimately dances his way back onto the big stage into Selina’s eternally warm and beating heart. Along the way, encounters with a few gamely performing fellow travellers of the popular music road to glory (Waller, Calloway, the Nicholas Brothers) are so electric as to effectively drain the Technicolor right out of Oz — and Stormy Weather is in black and white.

While Horne’s soul-shuddering climatic rendition of the title number is deservedly lodged in the firmament of excerpted movie musical moments, and Calloway’s hair-unslicking performance of ‘Geechy Joe’ tells you all you need to know about where rock music would find its balls, the movie finds its surest passage of pure musical epic poetry in a fifteen-minute segment that takes Robinson from the minstrel stage, where black performers in blackface perform the kind of plantation extravaganza that was both typical and phenomenally popular for both black and white audiences of its day (and from which both Al Jolson and Bing Crosby at least partly sprang), to an upriver barge where an impromptu dance and Tramp Band jug jam busts loose, and finally to the Memphis joint proudly announcing the appearance that night of Fats Waller (making a killer screen appearance before passing on only months later).

By the time we enter those doors and encounter Bill about to take the order from the table where Selina sits in mock-oblivious anticipation of her foretold reunion with the man who danced so divinely way back at the beginning, Stormy Weather has taken us on a remarkably economical and musically articulated history of black American music and performance from the 19th century up to the horizon of what would eventually mark the new frontier of twentieth century popular music. From Stephen Foster to Fats Waller, the Broadway plantation to Memphis juke joint, from minstrelsy to rhythm and blues, tap to jive, this is the propulsive upstream steamrolling of African-American musical performance into the heart of country, the rhythmic foundations of the country’s most popular musical forms, and the consciousness of a world now technologically tuned in like never before. It’s a truly stunning passage, if more for the suggestive economy of the journey than its cinematic articulation — director Andrew Stone is hardly Cabin‘s Vincente Minnelli, but he knows enough to set the frame, sit back respectfully and get out of the music’s way — and by the time it has dropped you in Waller’s ample and randy lap for ‘Ain’t Misbehavin'”, the only logical place to bounce from there is straight into the future. If you want to keep that momentum going and follow the logic of the music as mapped out by Stormy Weather, I’d suggest springing straight into The Girl Can’t Help It. (Warner Home Video)

And then, presumably, we are supposed to sit back and enjoy, our refined contemporary sensibilities providing some comforting distance and insulation from the ignorance and insensitivity of previous dark ages, and assured in the knowledge that we are creatures of more enlightened times.

What bullshit. First of the disclaimer serves to flatter us into the entirely arguable presumption that we’re any better, smarter or more racially unburdened by prejudice than folks were back in 1943, and secondly it picks on what might arguably stand as one of the most daring and progressive pop cultural artefacts of its day — an all-black musical produced by MGM, Hollywood’s most powerful mainstream studio — as an instance of prehistoric attitudes and shameful insensitivity. As far as I know, similar disclaimers are not (unskippably) evident on any releases of Gone With the Wind, Imitation of Life, Shaft, Assault on Precinct 13 or Big Momma’s House, all movies which in their way are equally ‘stereotypical’ instances of racial attitudes of their day, but which presumably require no lessons in historically hermetic packaging to contextualize and forgive our amusement. Why this movie of all movies that depict race in its time, and not the virtual thousands of others? And why, for god’s sake, not westerns, perhaps the most ubiquitous form of popular narrative in which the formulation of race was an essential part of the narrative’s function and purpose? Stereotypes, if that’s the word we wish to use, are also an inescapable part of pop culture’s industry: they’re the basic ingredients for the mass production of character, and crucial to the business of creating stories that are designed to appeal to the largest possible audiences in the most direct and simple terms. They made be ideological in meaning, but in purpose and function they’re purely practical. The less we have to do to understand what a character signifies, the more successful a signifier that character is.

In its way and in its day then, Cabin in the Sky was something of a bold leap outside of the ordinary, a musical which not only insisted upon the legitimacy of a fantasy world populated entirely by black people — a form of segregation yes, but segregation imagined as wish fulfillment and fantasy ideal, the stock in trade of the musical itself — but which presumed an appeal to popular audiences based on pure entertainment and escapist surrender, and which would not have existed if there wasn’t an underlying suspicion that the movie wouldn’t appeal to both black and white audiences — and mixed variations thereof — if it didn’t first and foremost function as a whole lot of fun. If anything, Cabin in the Sky reflects Hollywood’s endearingly arrogant presumption of its own divine transcendence: that nothing promoted colour-blindness quite like entertainment. Build that stairway to heaven sturdily enough — and Cabin literally does just that — and it will hold anyone’s dreams. Everybody wants to believe they have a crack at something better. If anything, race is something to be left at the bottom, and Hollywood profited from making everybody believe they were welcome to forget who they were for a while.

A Faustian fable adapted from a Broadway play, Cabin in the Sky depicts the struggle for the stained immortal soul of the likeable but good-for-nothing gunshot gambler Joe (Eddie Anderson) fought between agents of Heaven and Hell, both of which are depicted as uniformed brass-band marchers to different drummers. But if the side of Heaven is represented by the starched-white pomp of Kenneth Spencer’s The General, it’s Hell that provides the movie not only with comic relief but the tantalizing waft of jazz, sin and sex. (It’s no accident in this regard that Louis Armstrong, his hair teased into horns and his horn at his side, is on Rex Ingram’s ‘Lucifer Junior’s’ team competing for Joe’s soul.) Given six weeks to prove he’s above temptation, and provided with monumental moral and spiritual support by his wife Petunia (Ethel Waters), Joe nonetheless constantly tilts toward the dirty, juke-joint side of town, but who wouldn’t, considering that that’s not only where the booze flows and dice rolls, but where a palpitatingly bare-midriffed Lena Horne beckons, Duke Ellington leads the band, and everybody seems to be having such an insanely good time.

You’d choose Hell too, so it seems only logical that the movie achieves its moment of peak conviction and intensity when Waters’ Petunia, who has in no way undersold the better way of doing things by praying, singing (most unforgettably ‘Happiness is a Thing Called Joe’ and ‘Taking a Chance on Love’) and direct-dialing God himself, finally decides to wrestle for her Joe on the devil’s own terms, which means going down to the dance hall and showing them all how the business of being bad is really done, in the process merely confirming what the movie’s been so unconvincingly trying to deny all along: that maybe Heaven is all sin, all the time, and the only way to get there is to give up, give in and dance.

Despite the literal appearance of that stairway to heaven at the end of the movie, which has had to resort from stock footage from The Wizard of Oz to properly destroy the juke joint and pave the way to the righteous upward path, the fact of the matter is Joe and Petunia hardly seem to be heading to a better place when the credits are about to fall and even Joe makes doleful note of just how much climbing is involved in getting to the right place. The fun is being left behind and below: we know it and they know it, and God knows Vincente Minnelli, making his movie debut after scorching his way up and down Broadway, knows it. Watch how his camera seems to practically take flight whenever required to enter the sinful side of the movie’s street, how much more jazzed the young director’s muse is when tempted by matters of the flesh. Like just about everybody involved in Cabin in the Sky, Minnelli knows that piety may play better in principle, but practice is what gives sinning its edge. No wonder he was about to embark on a career as the musical’s most stylish and shamelessly sensual manipulator. Heaven could wait until the bar closed, and everybody’s money was the same colour. (Warner Home Video)

When Tony Manero (John Travolta, shiny and new, and all of 23 years old), tells his paint-store boss to “Fuck the future!”, he comes as close to a declaration of militant self-awareness and purpose as he ever gets in this movie about awakening to the utter pointlessness of his life, and in the process aligns himself to that other brief musical rallying point of the young urban disenfranchised of the butt-end baby boom. But Tony’s punk cred is strictly old school, in the angry upstart immigrant hooligan sense. If Tony has any awareness of the noise being made by those kids whose fucking of the future involves safety pins and re-purposed biker jackets, let alone those stripping beats from old funk records for black and hispanic block parties in the Bronx, he’s only hearing it distantly, from across the span of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge where Tony sits dreaming of anywhere but here, which is in this case is Brooklyn before the barista apocalypse. But Tony’s means of sticking it to tomorrow is disco, not punk or hiphop, which means even his preferred form of avoiding tomorrow is already yesterday.

Of the three top-grossing movies of 1977, Saturday Night Fever was only one, distantly tracking Star Wars  and Close Encounters, not just thematically but literally planted in the now and on the street, on which Tony’s cuban heels clicked so divinely as he delivered paint to the irresistible four-four rhythms of “Stayin’ Alive.” For the future was coming whether Tony was ready and/or willing or not, and it — or at least a wish-fulfilling, mass-cult, back-to-the-womb cocoon-wrap version of it — was about to sweep not only Tony but the kind of movie he appeared in into time capsule oblivion.

What seems most consistently to surprise people who watch the movie out of its time, but which was frankly almost as bracing then as now, is how low-to-the-ground and unromantic Fever is, how thoroughly convinced it is not only of the shallowness and futility of Tony’s dreams of dance-floor deliverance, but of the circumstances that drive the poor, beautiful but painfully dim backseat stud onto the floor of the 2001 Odyssey disco in the first place. In long-view terms an heir to the Depression-era musical in which underclass strivers took to stage as the only available means of self-actualization and brutally competitive hope for reaching the stars, Fever in the short-term was a Hell’s Kitchen-sink melodrama of strangulating blood ties and self-immolating hoodlum misadventure, as much influenced by Mean Streets, Sidney Lumet and the whole 42nd street cinema of junkie tragedy as it was glam fantasy.

Indeed, what strikes most vividly — again then as now — is how dramatically and unequivocally the 2001 Odyssey disco itself (the name providing another unsubtle reference to the desperately escapist function the future plays in providing fleeting fixes of beamed-up transfiguration) is offered as the meagerest of strongholds against reality. It sits sad and ugly on a parking lot, features a depressing strip-bar adjacent to the dance floor, and only comes alive when Tony and his even dimmer cohorts — racist, homophobic, junked-up back-seat gang-bangers nearly every one — bring both enough cash and delusional wherewithal to invest the dive with sufficient projected bullshit to lift it to where Tony can take the floor and show us just what keeps bringing him back long enough to go broke and hustle semi-gloss for another miserable week. On the floor, with the lights pumping adrenaline, energy and light-sabre stabs of colour into his body from above and below, Tony is the King of Saturday Night and the 2001 Odyssey the mothership to the stars the name suggests. But even then, even when the dance floor beckons and Tony is merely a stubbed-butt away from the kingdom, the movie is almost puritanically insistent on maintaining our awareness of how futile, ephemeral and pointless this all is: the pathetic presence of the soul-stricken kid on teetering platforms (Barry Miller) who’s knocked up his girlfriend and only gets to hang around because he’s got a car, the women who allow themselves to be treated like shit because it’s the only alternative to being treated like nothing, the constant stressing of intolerance, hatred, racism and fear as the only ties that bind this crew of oblivious losers together.

Note even how ultimately sexless Tony’s transfiguration into the King of Saturday Night is: how his biggest stepping-out moment (to “You Should Be Dancing”) only comes after he brushes off his overly-available partner (Fran Drescher) and commands the floor himself, how even his vehicle for extra-dimensional deliverance is strictly a solo pod. (He doesn’t even fuck his uptown fantasy-partner — Karen Lynn Gorney — instead reverting to accepted  gang protocol by opting for an attempted backseat assault.) Call it narcissism or call it willful delusion, but Tony’s fantasy only has room for one passenger, and it’s about to burn up entirely on re-entry to earth’s atmosphere — as the movie prepares us to know it must and would. As a cautionary fable about the enduring power, stark reckoning and treacherous promise of pop music for those who need to buy into it, Saturday Night Fever is as uncompromising a movie as any. That it ultimately turned out to be based on an article — by Nik Cohn, published in New York magazine in 1976 as ‘The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’ — that turned out itself to be entirely fabricated and bullshit — somehow only makes its articulation of this essential spiritual truth that much more poignantly on the money.

Yes, it’s a movie locked and soldered to its moment, but it’s also a movie about the intoxicating allure of the moment — in its most enhanced, outrageously overdressed and artificially pumped form — for somebody who has nothing outside of that moment. Tony is locked in the moment because it’s all he has. That the moment itself is fleeting is exactly what gives Saturday Night Fever its paradoxically lingering pertinence and power: this is a movie about a man about to outlive that moment, released to a future there was no dancing away from. (Paramount Home Video)

Swindle began as Who Killed Bambi?, a notion McLaren had to make a Pistols movie while the smoking gun was still hot, and which he likely knew was cooling as fast as a flying gob of spit. Hiring the soft-core porn king Russ Meyer as director and future national treasure movie critic Roger Ebert as writer, McLaren concocted as scenario in which he’d reveal to the world his snide, ten-point manifesto of world domination through the creation of a band and a phenomenon that would lay waste to industry greed and bovine public herding habits.

Nothing remotely revolutionary so far. As anyone who’s seen The Girl Can’t Help It, Lonely Boy, Tommy, Privilege or Head knows, the movies could spot a kindred con from a mile away, and had long pegged rock ‘n’ roll as a takes-one-to-know-one snake oil pit. But the untiringly self-promoting McLaren was determined to reveal to the world his own masterful agency in the big bait and switch, even if it hinged on no small amount of pure bullshit. For one thing, McLaren’s claim that the key to his success was creating a sensation around a band that had no talent, ambition or brains is so utterly disproved by the movie’s live performances you’re left wondering if he ever really understood just what he’d helped detonate. Or ears to hear. And then there’s the fact that punk itself, described by McLaren as an act of pure cynicism motivated by naught but profit, somehow managed to spark a viral epidemic of D.I.Y. of back-to-basics musical energy that’s been surging somewhere ever since.

So who fooled whom here? And just who was Johnny Rotten addressing when he spoke those final, almost biblically-ordained words to the band’s last audience in San Francisco: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The joke, it would seem, is on the guy who thought it was all his doing, and who very likely helped facilitate — and not in any way create — one of the most important rock ‘n’ roll reboots in the music’s history. More than anything, what punk, perhaps more potently and valuably in spirit than actual practice, accomplished was a resurrection of possibility in music, a resurgence of the idea that it was yours to make in any way you wanted. If there was seduction involved, it was to the idea that rock ‘n’ roll not only still mattered, but could make a noise loud enough to make the world notice and make some more.

By the time Temple, barely 23, was hired on to make something of the mess left behind by the unsurprisingly departed Meyer and aggressively non-compliant Rotten, his job was to stitch together a movie out of shards and threads, a kind of movie version of the punk scissors-and-glue Never Mind the Bollocks aesthetic, and in this sense the movie he made is as emblematic an artefact of its times as Lydon’s green hair or Steve Jones’ Union Jack head doily. Yes, it’s something of a mess and terminally at odds with its own mission to insist that punk was an act of purely commercial exploitation perpetrated by a King’s Row rag shop dandy, but it’s this very sloppiness and self-immolating internal friction that also lends it something that McLaren himself would insist entirely tosh, but which nevertheless may count as rock music’s most productive and revitalizing core self-delusion: authenticity. The ‘real’ thing isn’t the thing itself, but the belief in it, and in this punk was selling something as precious as music. (Shout! Factory)

That the charges stuck in the minds of so many isn’t really that surprising: if there’s one perennial truism that runs through the history of popular music like a black, sludgy vein of the Mississippi itself, it’s that the truth is always probably somewhat messier and dirtier, and best assessed through the greasy filters of money and ego. This is so self-evident by now that some of us simply presume that bullshit is the price of popular music — good, bad and otherwise — and that the truth really only matters in the way it did on that other frontier where legend always tended to grab the glory and gallop away. Which is to say as a reminder that the only thing that really matters is the music, and the fact is The Band, which consisted of four scraggly and gifted Southern Ontario refugees — Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson — and one son of an Arkansas dirt farmer (Helm), made some of the most amazing and enduringly distinctive music of their day.

That this music is so carefully and exhilaratingly captured in The Last Waltz, which is arranged as a kind of tribute party cum jam session in which some of the band’s biggest influences (Muddy Waters, The Staple Singers), heavyweight contemporaries (Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison) and former boss-men (Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan) step out for a number or two and step off for the next featured guest, is of course why the movie registered so quickly as something significant and special, but there was another element of Scorsese’s m.o. which also rendered The Last Waltz almost as instantly vulnerable to such compelling revisionist accounts as Helm’s.

In between those frequently blood-pumping musical numbers — some from the concert, others, like those with Emmylou Harris (‘Evangeline’) and the Staples (an absolutely stirring rendition of ‘The Weight’), shot on a soundstage — are a number of interview sequences which are almost impossible to see the same way once Helm’s version of events has parked itself between you and the movie. The fact is, Scorsese does tend to privilege Robertson’s account of events over everyone else’s, and Scorsese does tend, through the deft alchemical collusion of editing choices and sheer charisma, to frame the guitarist as the movie’s primary star and host-storyteller. For one thing, the only person who seems to be speaking definitely on behalf of the need for The Band’s retirement is Robertson, and for another no one speaks for The Band’s influences — and, ergo, the guest performer lineup — as much as Robbie Robertson. In these sequences, there is no question that the impression of The Band as Robertson’s band is virtually inescapable, and this is only made retrospectively more apparent when you watch the rest of the members during these sequences after you’ve been acquainted with Helm’s version of events: Helm seems mostly to sit quietly (too quietly) back while Robertson does most of the conversational driving; Danko seems to appear only for the purpose of providing endorsement of Robertson’s anecdotes; Hudson barely figures as a conversational player; and poor Manuel (who would hang himself after a gig in 1986) mostly seems just utterly and sadly wrecked.

But if those passages of The Last Waltz have become impossible to watch in quite the same way over time — which is not to say that they’re any less riveting for it — the music itself has, if anything, only become that much more monumentally impressive. And here’s the thing about musicians, or at least those musicians whose connection with each other exists on a level that somehow transcends all earthly considerations of interpersonal nonsense and bullshit: as a both a backup band and a force unto themselves, The Band were almost unparalleled as a mutually attuned musical unit, and this quality of rare performative synchronicity — which had to be what drew Dylan to them in the first place — resulted in some of the most remarkably authentic-sounding, dirt-grounded, weirdly timeless ‘roots’ music to be heard in the American post-folk revival era. Together as musicians, these guys had a thing that not only clicked but chemically reacted, and the fact that it’s so starkly in evidence on the stage of the Winterland Ballroom on November 25, 1976, at a time when resentments were likely as high as most of the guests likely were, is simply sure-as-shit proof of greatness. Ultimately, the intrusion of what may well be the truth of The Band has in this case only clarified why the truth will always struggle to be heard over the music. (MGM)