THE BAND The Last Waltz (Warner Bros.)

by Joe Goldberg

Four of the five members of The Band (Levon Helm excepted) are Canadian, but they have come to represent, to many, a unique repository of what is best and most enduring in American music.

They are almost as well known for their anti-showbiz stance as for their music, yet they turned their farewell concert at San Francisco's Winterland, on Thanksgiving night, 1976, into one of the most highpowered all-star reviews ever seen, ; gave it a lovely nostalgic title, and have gotten a three-record set out of it, with a feature film to come, directed by no less, than Martin Scorsese.

Things are not always what they seem.

The Band has always seemed to have an immigrant's love for America. Or at least the tourist's eye view. They notice things others, do not, on the same principle that one of the best movies ever made about New York, Sweet Smell Of Success, was made by an Englishman, Alexander MacKendrick.