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

The director and the guitarist grew close, especially during postproduction, and pretty soon they were living together and jetting off to parties in Paris or Rome. That closeness caused friction: Despite the acclaim for “The Last Waltz,” some members of the Band felt that Robertson had made the film about him, rather 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 called the movie “a disaster” and accused Scorsese of making Robertson look great while ignoring other band members.

By then, Robertson and Helm had arrived at very different levels of success and financial comfort. “Robbie won. Levon lost,” Ken Gordon wrote in a 2015 essay in The Bitter Southerner. Some people reflexively side with winners, others with losers, and after Helm’s book came out, Robertson’s reputation suffered in some circles, and possibly influenced subsequent evaluations of “The Last Waltz,” especially 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, adding 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 that, unwittingly or not, reveals the cutthroat nature of the business.

Nearly 25 years after the release of “The Last Waltz,” its placement on lists of the best music documentaries was so common that the consensus around the film was ripe for a challenge. “‘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 movie that same year, 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 movie is more skeptically understood now, but its stature has never waned. Even its stoutest opponents recognize its quality. “Critics called the movie the best and most sumptuous film ever made about a rock concert,” Levon Helm wrote grumpily in his book, “and I suppose that’s true.”