THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN' JACK
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Lot 47 Films/Plantain Films Director: Aiyana Elliott Writer: Rick Dahl, Aiyana Elliott Cast: Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Kris Kristofferson, Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk
Sometimes a movie is not what you expect it to be, embracing ultimately a deeper theme than the obvious one. A recent example is "Frequency," billed as a sci-fi feature dealing with a man's reaching back thirty years into the past via a ham radio he discovers gathering dust in the closet. "Frequency" is, to be sure, a science fiction picture about time travel but its real aim is to pay homage to the love between a father and his son. Now, "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack," a documentary that was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival this year, is about a major American folk singer who could not abide the New York City of his birth but preferred the wide open spaces of the West and South. But its real subject is the relationship of a father and his daughter, the latter appearing behind the camera as the director who, unseen, is interviewing her dad but has never been able to know the man. Do we get to know Jack Elliott more after seeing this movie? You bet. Does his daughter? Ironically, no, at least not in the way she has spent her life trying to understand him. If you keep this point in mind while you watch the movie, you'll be rewarded with just a little extra appreciation for its considerable merits.
Edited down from 200 hours of film, largely family archival material taken on Super 8, 16mm and digital video and transferred digitally to 35mm, "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack" takes us into the vivid and colorful world of its title character who was born Elliott Adnopoz in 1931, the son of a Jewish doctor on Brooklyn's Linden Boulevard. Not content with the insular style of that Flatbush area, he joined a rodeo. We watch him busting broncos at several points in the film, his love for horses and a world that lay beyond the Eastern seaboard never leaving him for an instant.
Given his frequent travels to the South and West, we don't wonder that his marriages did not last, only that he felt the itch to tie the knot at all--which he did four times in his sixty- eight years. Daughter Aiyana Elliott, who co-wrote the screenplay in addition to directing this docu feature, shows his departure by boat for Europe in 1955 with his first wife, June Shelley, and takes us to the concert stages of the Continent where Elliott's American music is in demand. Elliott, who talks in such a non-stop manner that interviewee Kris Kristofferson half-jokingly guesses that the nickname came not from Elliott's travels but from his rambling conversations, is nothing if not opinionated. Casting dispersions on the heavy um-pah music of Germany and the silly romantic tradition of French song, he praises the wonderful Flamenco that he heard in Spain while always venerating American traditional song above all.
Despite the wealth of material from which Aiyana Elliott could have drawn, she spends most of her time focussing on her modern-day sexagenarian father, which is understandable given her obsession with finally learning more about him than she had ever been able to. But now that he is in his late sixties his voice is raspy, a plus, I suppose, for those who take folk seriously enough to think that scratchy means "authentic," but for my folk song dollar I'd have appreciated more songs from his concerts in and about the year 1961 and fewer interruptions of those songs. I'd have cut some of the talking heads in favor of more footage showing us not what kind of person Jack really is. Rather I'd want to know what there is about his music that made him relatively unappreciated throughout his life only to gain his principal recognition in taking a Grammy in 1995 and receiving the National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton in 1998 for a lifetime of melodic achievement.
The picture just might make those who are under forty years of age and who have been brought up on acid rock, heavy metal and the like wonder what the folks saw in traditional American ballads during the stodgy fifties and the transitional early sixties. Older people, especially those who did the Greenwich Village circuit of the Bitter End and Gerde's Folk City and especially hung out in Washington Square park on warm Sunday afternoons, know exactly the appeal of this gentle, down-home form that ultimately became lost in the commercializations of the Kingston Trio only to disappear with the advent of rock music. It's good to see the old guys back on screen again, folks like Izzy Young, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta and Woodie Guthrie himself, in some cases picking away at their banjos and guitars and in other instances just rapping about the good times before the music died.
Not Rated. Running time: 112 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews