Five films that inspired Bob Dylan
We know Bob Dylan drew tremendous inspiration from the books he read and the music he listened to, but he was perhaps equally influenced by cinema. How could he not have been? He rose to fame during one of the most explosive periods in cinematic history. Below, we’ll be looking at five films that shaped his music.
Close friends with some of the most innovative filmmakers of the 1960s, including Andy Warhol and Martin Scorsese, Dylan also found the time direct a couple of his own features. The first of these was 1972’s Eat The Document, an account of his 1966 tour of the UK and Ireland with the Hawks.
However, it is his second directorial effort, Renaldo and Clara, that is perhaps best-remembered. Featuring performances by Dylan, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Sara Dyland and Harry Dean Stanton, it follows the same narrative structure as Marcel Carné’s 1945 epic Children of Paradise, a film that informed his music as well.
Renaldo and Clara was also inspired by the boldness of the French New Wave, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut are a recurring theme in Bob’s early musical output. He was famously besotted with Brigitte Bardot, penning his first-ever song for the actress: “I don’t recall too much of it,” he told Playboy in 1966. “It had only one chord. Well, it is all in the heart.” Well said, Bob.
Five films that inspired Bob Dylan:
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945)
Dylan’s interest in cinema occasionally saw him pluck fragments of film dialogue and use them as lyrics. Take his Blonde On Blonde track ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine’), which quotes Marcel Carné’s 1945 film Children of Paradise. Considering Dylan would have watched the film with English subtitles, it’s no wonder the line stuck with him.
Made under the German occupation and released at the time of the liberation, Les Enfants du Paradis looks back to the Paris of Balzac in an attempt to escape the harsh reality of the war-torn city. It takes place in the 1830s and centres on the occupants of Paris’s Boulevard du Crime – named not for its illicit reputation but for the number of theatres showing gory melodramas.
Recalling some of the difficulties he encountered making the film, Carne told Criterion: “We were very scared. Since the film wasn’t finished, we had to be slyer than they were. What was really annoying was when we had scenes with extras, and God knows there were a lot. In the morning, the Germans came in with their own extras, from the unions, and made us use them. So we had to talk them out of it, since we didn’t like them—they were collaborators, you understand.”
Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955)
Dylan loved films. He talked about them a lot. But there aren’t so many that actually altered his worldview. Richard Brooks’ 1955 social drama Blackboard Jungle, on the other hand, changed everything. In the 1960s, Dylan developed a reputation as a radical, and it’s easy to see how this pioneering exploration of the inner-city educational system might have crystallised his disdain for authority.
Starring Glenn Ford as an English teacher at a rough New York high school for boys, Blackboard Jungle is a remarkably prescient piece of filmmaking, predicting the dominance of youth culture in the late 60s and ’70s and the war generation’s complete inability to comprehend it.
Dylan was just 14 when he watched Blackboard Jungle. It left an indelible mark. In Dylan: A Biography, the songwriter’s childhood friend Leroy Hoikkala recalls: “Bob couldn’t believe it. We were walking home past the Alice School, and he kept saying, ‘This is really great! This is exactly what we’ve been trying to tell people about ourselves!'”
La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
Three months after Bob Dylan arrived in New York in the winter of 1961 he went to a showing of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in Greenwich Village. Th film’s iconic female lead, Anita Ekberg, left quite the impression, with Bob namechecking the actress (alongside Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren) in his The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan track ‘I Shall Be Free’.
About a year later, Dylan bumped into Nico at one of Andy Warhol’s parties and explained that he remembered her small role in the film. I doubt The Velvet Underground member, who was credited under her birth name Christa Paffgen, was entirely convinced.
In Chronicles, Dylan remembers watching La Dolce Vita for the first time. “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.”
Shoot The Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)
In the liner notes for his 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin, Dylan mentions yet another ’60s European classic. “There’s a movie called Shoot the Piano Player,” he writes, “the last line proclaimin’, ‘music, man, that’s where it’s at.'”
Directed by pioneering French new wave director François Truffaut, Shoot The Piano Player tells the story of a classical pianist who learns that his illustrious career is result of his wife sleeping with a top agent. After packing it in, changing his name and starting a new life as a jazz pianist in a Parisian dive bar, he gets tangled up with some local gangsters and is forced to go on the run.
Interestingly, the titular pianist, Charlie Koller, was played by Charles Aznavour, one of Dylan’s favourite French singers. In a 1987 interview for Rolling Stone, Dylan described him as one of the five best live performers he’d ever seen. “I like Charles Aznavour a lot,” he said. “I saw him in sixty-something at Carnegie Hall, and he just blew my brains out. I went there with somebody who was French, not knowing what I was getting myself into.”
Billy Bronco (Clint Eastwood, 1980)
Dylan liked a western. He even appeared in one: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which he makes a memorable cameo as Alias. Dylan also composed the soundtrack, which features a rendition of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’
In ‘Seeing the Real You At Last’ from 1985’s Empire Burlesque, 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.”
It features Eastwood as the star of an unsuccessful Wild West show, who does his best to keep his fellow entertainers in high spirits despite waning interest. After encountering Antoinette Lily, a wealthy, spoiled and recently-married heiress who has decided to abandon her husband, Bronco Billy convinces her to join the troupe as his assistant, much to the crew’s chagrin.
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