The greatest classic movie reference in Bob Dylan songs
Bob Dylan’s career coincided with an explosion of cinematic innovation. As such, the songwriter’s catalogue is speckled with film references, the best of which remind us that Dylan was always looking outward, that his greatest records were encapsulations of the world around him, films and all.
Bob Dylan arrived in New York in January 1961. Just three months later, Frederico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opened in US cinemas. The film clearly made a strong impression on young Bob because he namechecked its female lead, Anita Ekberg, in ‘I Shall Be Free’ alongside two other actresses of the era, Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren. When Dylan met Velvet Underground singer Nico a year later, he claimed that he remembered her small role in the film, which is remarkable considering she was working under her birth name Christa Paffgen back then.
Recounting the experience of watching La Dolce Vita for the first time, Dylan wrote in Chronicles: “There was an art movie house in the Village on 12th Street that showed foreign movies — French, Italian, German. This made sense, because even Alan Lomax himself, the great folk archivist, had said somewhere that if you want to get out of America, go to Greenwich Village. I’d seen a couple of Italian Fellini movies there — one called La Strada, which means “the Street,” and another one called La Dolce Vita. It was about a guy who sells his soul and becomes a gossip hound. It looked like life in a carnival mirror.”
Dylan makes reference to another ’60s European classic in his 11 Outlined Epitaphs, the liner notes for his 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’. “there’s a movie called Shoot the Piano Player,” he writes, “the last line proclaimin’, ‘music, man, that’s where it’s at.'” Interestingly, Shoot The Piano Player, directed by French new wave director Francois Truffaut, starred Charles Aznavour, one of Dylan’s favourite singers, as Charlie Kohler.
Dylan’s interest in cinema occasionally saw him pluck fragments of film dialogue and use them as lyrics. Take ‘Seeing the Real You At Last’, for example, featured on his 1985 album Empire Burlesque. In one of the final verses, Dylan sings, “When I met you, baby / You didn’t show no visible scars / You could ride like Annie Oakley / You could shoot like Belle Starr,” Clint Eastwood delivers that same line in his 1980 comedy Bronco Billy, in which the titular character says “I’m looking for a woman who can ride like Annie Oakley and shoot like Belle Starr.”
Dylan may also have lifted the title of one of his Blonde On Blonde tracks from Marcel Carne’s 1945 film, Children of Paradise, in which the female lead, Garance, says: “You go your way, and I’ll go mine.” The fact that Dylan would have seen the line written down in English subtitles may have made it more memorable than it would have otherwise been.
We’ll end with what has to be the most bizzare and unlikely film reference in Dylan’s back catalogue. In 2012, Dylan marked the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic by releasing a 14-minute epic called ‘Tempest’. In one particularly memorable verse, Dylan references the infamous “paint me like one of your French girls scene” in James Cameron’s Titanic: “Leo took his sketchbook / He was often so inclined,” he sings. “He closed his eyes and painted / The scenery in his mind.” Some have suggested that, in referencing Leonardo Dicaprio’s character, he was offering a reply to James Cameron, who had Leo’s character, Jack Dawson, quote Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone; with the line “When you’ve got nothing you’ve got nothing to lose.”
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