Growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota, an iron-rich mining town in the 1940s and ’50s, Bob Dylan didn’t encounter much nonconformity or social upheaval. Except in movies.
It was at local theaters, one of which was owned by her relatives, that she first laid eyes on Brigitte Bardot, an early crush and muse for some of her first songs.
“Okay, my phone rang, it won’t stop.
This is President Kennedy calling me.
He said, ‘My friend, Bob, what do we need to develop the country?’
I said, ‘My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren…”
— “I’ll Be Free” by Bob Dylan
Young Bob wore a leather jacket after seeing Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” When he saw the juvenile melodrama “Blackboard Jungle” with its modern rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, he reportedly told a friend, “This is exactly what we want to tell people about ourselves. Trying to.”
Seeing James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” inspired him to stand up against the shackles of Cold War conformity in his music.
Once Dylan settled in New York’s Greenwich Village, it was arthouse international films that caught his eye: Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” … Fellini’s “La dolce vita. ” That film, about a tabloid journalist searching in vain for fulfillment in a happy room, Dylan later said, was “like life in a carnival mirror.”
Dylan’s first major film appearance, however, was a cameo in director Sam Peckinpah’s “Pete Garrett and Billy the Kid.” The movie spawned the classic song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” now Nobel laureateThe most streamed song of
His music has graced film scores, from “The Big Lebowski” to, most recently, “St. Vincent.”
One film stuck with Dylan for decades: “The Gunfighter,” starring Gregory Peck. When Peck heard his name on Dylan’s epic 1986 ballad “Brownsville Girl,” he called him to thank him. Peck would reciprocate his gratitude in 1997, when he presented Dylan with the Kennedy Center Honor.
The new biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring an astonishing Timothée Chalamet, is hardly Dylan’s first cinematic picture. But it’s a reminder of the enduring and symbolic relationship between Dylan and movies … and a welcome excuse to revisit the work of this singularly American artist.
Click the video player below to watch the trailer for “A Complete Unknown”:
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Story by Robert Marston. Editor: George Pozdrake.
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