The 10 best anti-fascist movies of all-time: The Great Dictator, Brazil, The Spirit of the Beehive, Porco Rosso, and more.
By Wilson Chapman
Fascism: Arguably the most insidious and evil political ideology to have ever been created. Less a true belief than a cynical way to control and stifle opposition, fascism emerged in the early 20th century in Italy, with Benito Mussolini’s reign as dictator of the country from 1922 to 1945, and is most famously (at least in the United States) associated with Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler. But it’s a means of governance that can infect any country. At its core, fascism is a far-right authoritarian philosophy that puts the nation above the individual, and is characterized by an autocratic government, a dictatorial leader with unobstructed power, heavy militarism, severe economic regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition. It’s a terrifying force that at its core, believes in the dehumanization and oppression of human beings. Good thing we in the United States don’t have to worry about it!
Oh…wait a minute…
Suffice to say, as recent events have pushed fascism from something Americans study to something we’re actively living through, watching movies about the ideology might not be the type of escapist cinema that the masses are clamoring for. But anti-fascism has a long and rich history in filmmaking, with movies being made as attacks against the ideology as early as 1940, with Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece “The Great Dictator.”
That’s not to say that movies that support fascism don’t (unfortunately) exist: infamously, Leni Riefenstahl‘s 1935 film “Triumph of the Will” is both one of the greatest and most important movies ever made from a sheer technical level — it’s and also shameless Nazi propaganda. But fascism, as an ideology, is anti-individualistic, anti-intellectual, and anti-art. So it’s unsurprising that over the decades, artists have used cinema as a vehicle to expose and explore the evils of fascist regimes, from Nazi Germany to Fascist Italy to completely fictional worlds (what is “Star Wars” if not the story of the fight against space fascists?)
As America lurches forth into an uncertain future, we can’t promise that watching these 10 films will somehow save the country from itself. However, at its core anti-fascist filmmaking can serve as a reminder and a warning against the evils of authoritarian governance, and a hopeful reminder that these governments can be stopped. Read on for the 10 best anti-fascist films of all time, listed in chronological order.
With editorial contributions from Christian Blauvelt.
Photo : Courtesy Everett Collection
“The Great Dictator” (1940)
Made at a time when the United States was still at peace with Nazi Germany and the country hadn’t yet woken up to the horrors of fascism, “The Great Dictator” was a bold work from arguably the then-most famous filmmaker in the world, a satire that argued passionately against the antisemitism and totalitarianism on the rise in Europe at the time. Charles Chaplin directed and starred in a dual role, playing obvious Hitler stand-in “Adenoid Hynkel,” the dictator of the European country of Tomainia, as well as a Jewish barber and war veteran who rises up to fight against the poisonous corruption of his country. The film was Chaplin’s first true sound picture, and he put the jump in mediums to good use with a riveting, emotional final speech in which he drops the comedy to deliver a beautiful, impassioned plea for democracy and liberty. Although it was the most successful film he ever made, Chaplin himself came to regret “The Great Dictator” somewhat, writing in his autobiography that he would never have made it had the extent of the brutality Jewish people endured in concentration camps been public knowledge at the time. But if you forgive its lack of foresight, the film remains a funny, smart takedown of fascism to this day.
There’s a moment when you know all-American working mom Joan Bennett is going to have to end things with her husband, who’s become besotted with Nazism, once and for all: When he’s so indoctrinated their young son, the boy replies, “Ja, Vater!” That’s it. Take the child away. Hire the divorce lawyer. It’s over.
“The Man I Married” is an anti-fascist film as a “woman’s picture” domestic drama, and that proves a particularly potent genre to convey its message. Bennett’s character seems to have it all, but her husband (Francis Lederer) goes down the rabbit hole of Nazism and even moves the family to Hitler’s Germany. Which is why this very pro-divorce movie (rare for the studio era!) has a few more twists and turns after that “Ja, Vater!” shocker.
Bennett is basically presented as the average American in 1941: Not especially plugged in about what Nazism really means or the threat that it represents. Her dawning awareness of the danger it poses is that of the entire U.S. waking up and realizing just how dangerous it is. And that it needs to be stood up to, no matter how each freedom-loving person is able to resist in their own way — even if against their spouse. That it has the vibe of a 1940s Lifetime movie, and features one helluva twist ending, makes it all that much sweeter. —CB
Twenty-five years ago, Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke played libidinous teenage monsters in one of the most successful Britflicks in UK box office history. Since then, the British film industry has become crisis-stricken and largely Americanised, writes Adam White. Where did all the local stories go?
By Adan White
The laws of physics are challenged early in Kevin & Perry Go Large, when Harry Enfield’s sullen, spotty teenager foils a bank robbery with his erection. Later on in the film – one of the most successful British movies in UK box office history – the camera is splattered by the gloop from an infected belly-button piercing, Kathy Burke cops off in a sand dune while dressed in full Gallagher-brother drag, and a third-act cameo is provided by EastEnders’ Phil Mitchell. Kevin & Perry Go Large, about a pair of sex-starved mates attempting to lose their virginity in Ibiza, is absolute tosh. But it’s our tosh: the product of a nation that invented Viz, Lucozade, and Denise van Outen. And 25 years ago this month, it was the sort of slapdash, locally made and proudly creaky tosh that British audiences regularly flocked to see. Today, though, things are different. And it begs a simple question: did the movies change, or did we?
The year 2000 is often considered a nadir in the story of the British film industry, with too many nascent production companies – each flush with National Lottery funding – trying to make their own Guy Ritchie movies, or their own spins on Richard Curtis, or films designed to capitalise on the (questionable) allure of the Primrose Hill set. Numerous releases became punchlines in their own right: the office romcom Janice Beard 45 WPM with Patsy Kensit and Rhys Ifans; the grotty gangland turkey Rancid Aluminium with Sadie Frost and Rhys Ifans; the… err… equally grotty gangland turkey Love, Honour and Obey with Sadie Frost and Rhys Ifans. Others have been largely forgotten: Kelly Macdonald’s bingo hall comedy House!; the clubland murder mystery Sorted; the unholy union of disco music, psychic powers and a naked Stephen Fry titled Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?
I will not lie and declare these films any good, likewise many of the Britflicks that came and went through cinemas soon after the millennium. Even if you wear the thickest of nostalgia goggles, you won’t find a secret cult classic in Honest, Dave Stewart’s infamous Swinging Sixties crime thriller in which three members of the pop group All Saints dropped acid and took their tops off. But to watch any of these films again is to be immersed in work that could only ever be made in Britain. And – with that in mind – it’s staggering just how expansive the term “British film” used to be. At the other end of the quality spectrum, homegrown cinema meant that year’s Purely Belter, an endearingly chintzy Geordie comedy about teenage Newcastle United supporters. It also meant Wonderland, Michael Winterbottom’s tender ensemble drama about lonely, alienated Londoners. We had range.
Upon its release, Kevin & Perry Go Large was often contrasted with the previous year’s American Pie, another sex comedy about prurient teens, albeit one with a far less grubby bent. It was “more sophisticated fare”, as Empire magazine put it at the time – some claim for a film built around a scene in which Jason Biggs has sex with a dessert. But I suppose it’s accurate: whereas American Pie cast nebbishly handsome men and some of the most beautiful women of 1999 to play its horny yet earnest adolescents, Kevin & Perry is almost overwhelmingly ghoulish-looking.
Enfield and Burke, who originated the characters on the Nineties sketch show Harry Enfield & Chums, transform themselves into greasy-haired monsters; tantrum-throwing grotesques with craven libidos and a wardrobe of sagging shell suits. American Pie boasted Barenaked Ladies, Third Eye Blind and Norah Jones on its soundtrack. Kevin & Perry Go Large is built around a novelty dance track in which the pair repeatedly chant: “All I wanna do is do it – big girl, big girl”. It went to No 16 in the UK Top 40.
A Variety article in 2000 reported that Paramount Pictures did pick up Kevin & Perry for US distribution – with plans to position it as a British spin on Beavis and Butt-Head, apparently – but an actual release didn’t seem to materialise. It’s largely unthinkable for America to ever have “got” the film, though, with its “top shelf of a newsagent magazine rack” set pieces and laddish frivolity. Its entire creative approach is as British as bangers and mash, its aspirations admirably local.
Over time, British films like Kevin & Perry – meaning ones devoid of obvious global appeal – have become increasingly unusual, and rarely trouble the box office like they once did. Think Mike Leigh’s mesmeric Hard Truths, Molly Manning Walker’s holiday-from-hell drama How to Have Sex, or the little-seen 2024 comedy Seize Them! with Aimee Lou Wood. Think queer dramas Layla and Unicorns, or the Christmas movie Boxing Day, or recent film versions of TV series including Bad Education, The Inbetweeners and People Just Do Nothing. All worthy slices of thoroughgoing Britainalia, and satisfying to varying taste levels, yet few of them found a deserving audience.
The possible reasons for this are tenfold. The internet age is one defined by homogenisation and an Americanisation of creativity, while the genres that for years British film seemed to champion (comedy, romances, gritty character studies, even costume dramas) have largely migrated to television. Cinema tickets are expensive, and audiences are conditioned only to want to pay for blockbuster spectacle – something that is rarely financially viable for the UK film industry, and that, arguably, we’ve never been particularly good at making anyway.
Endearingly British tosh: Kathy Burke and Harry Enfield in ‘Kevin & Perry Go Large’ (Tiger Aspect Pics/Kobal/Shutterstock)
Still, it is concerning for the future of British cultural identity as a whole. Numerous industry power players have spoken in recent years of the crisis in UK film funding, and the increasing threat to specifically British storytelling. Statistics last year from the BFI were a sobering read: the overwhelming majority of film production spend in 2024 (87 per cent of it, in fact) was on “inward” productions such as Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon, and the next Knives Out sequel – films with largely American casts, American backers and global reach. “Domestic” productions – meaning films with a more overtly British bent and British backers – made up just nine per cent of spend.
Is it any wonder, then, that Britain is in such a cultural drought when so many of the films we make might just as well have been made anywhere? And that while movies including Barbie and Wicked – which were shot at Warner Bros Studios in Hertfordshire – helped inject millions into the UK economy, they barely spoke to British culture or British society, or reflected anything about our everyday existence. For all the criticism levelled 25 years ago at British cinema’s Class of 2000, it’s impossible to deny that films like Kevin & Perry, Purely Belter and Rancid Aluminium were ours. It was easy to see our humour in them. Our lives and foibles. Our teeth. Someone get Rhys Ifans’s agent on the phone and tell them we need him pronto.
In the 1950s, the emergence of ‘angry young men’ writers and kitchen sink dramas like ‘Look Back in Anger’, led to an increase in working-class representation.
By Aimee Ferrier
For many years, the lives of working-class British people were invisible on screen. Not only that, but actors from working-class backgrounds were hard to come by, thus meaning that a large chunk of Britain’s screen icons were privately educated or well-connected figures. This imbalance within the industry prevented authentic stories from being told, silencing the voices and experiences of a massive group of the British population.
Posh actors dominated the screens with their received pronunciation accents that asserted them as well-educated figures. “The working-class person always had to have an accent before, was often a joker, and peripheral,” actor Rita Tushingham told The Independent. Indeed, there were hardly any working-class protagonists or stories about the plight of poverty, unemployment, governmental disillusionment, or abortion.
Then, in the 1950s, the ‘angry young men’ movement emerged within the world of literature, theatre, and film, changing everything. Post-war, a new generation of young people were feeling dismayed by the widespread levels of unemployment and dead-end jobs that forced people to work to the bone for little money. Many people were unable to afford nice places to live, and countless individuals were suffering from PTSD, grief, and a sense of malaise.
People’s childhood towns and cities were now destroyed by bombs, leaving what was once a community in ruins, and this physical representation of destruction and emptiness mirrored the emotions many were feeling at the time. This disillusionment came to a boiling point in the mid-1950s as people struggled to move forward and prosper in a country still ravished by the effects of war and economic disparity.
However, with John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, a voice finally cut through. Michael Caine once discussed the play with The Guardian, explaining: “When it changed, it was all down to the writers. They started writing for working-class people and it made all the difference. Playwrights like Noël Coward, someone I later knew very well, wrote middle-class parts for the stage. If you had a cockney accent you were going to play the butler. But John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger in 1956, and that, I believe, was the first major piece of theatre that had a working-class hero.”
Things were beginning to change, with the stories of working-class people making more of a dent in popular culture than ever before. Other writers that were dubbed part of the ‘angry young men’ movement (although most hated this term) included Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, and John Braine, whose stories really changed the game in regards to the representation of normal British people and their struggles.
At the same time, the Free Cinema documentary movement helped to pave the way for depictions of British working-class issues on screen. These filmmakers—including Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz—used a cinema vérité style to cheaply chronicle elements of working-class life to great success.
L-R: Unknown, Suze Rotolo, Terri Thal, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk
By Ray Pagett
“I needed something to play for club owners, so I cut a tape at the Gaslight. Everybody said, ‘Go away.'”
Before Albert Grossman, Terri Thal was Bob Dylan’s first manager. Though, as she would be the first to admit, she was no Albert Grossman. Closer to a friend helping a newcomer get gigs, just as she was doing for her then-husband Dave Van Ronk. Dylan writes about her in Chronicles:
Van Ronk’s wife, Terri, definitely not a minor character, took care of Dave’s bookings, especially out of town, and she began trying to help me out. She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics — not so much the political issues but rather the highfalutin’ theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness. Intellectually it would be hard to keep up. If you tried, you’d find yourself in alien territory. Both were anti-imperialistic, antimaterialist. “What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener,” Terri once said as we walked past the shop window of a hardware store on 8th Street. “Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?”
During her six months as his manager, she made one huge contribution to Dylan’s recorded history. Looking for something to bring to club owners outside of NYC to convince them to book him, in September 1961 she recorded what would be become known as The First Gaslight Tape, one of his first concert recordings (the very first of a “regular” concert, since both Indian Neck and Riverside were special events). A recording Dylan fans have treasured for decades—even if the bookers at the time didn’t care.
Even after the manager bit ended, she remained friends with Dylan for a few years, and with Suze Rotolo for decades longer. She also remained close to Van Ronk even after they separated, after, as one chapter in her memoir My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me titles it, “Eleven Years and One Month.”
I spoke to Thal about those early-’60s Village days and what managing a 20-year-old Bob Dylan entailed. Plus I wanted to get her take on A Complete Unknown as someone who was actually there. “I’m not looking dispassionately at history,” she explains. “I’m looking at portrayals of friends.”
Thal and Van Ronk, August 1963, photo by Ann Charters
I have a lot of very specific questions but I’m going to start with a super broad one: What did you think of the movie?
I thought the movie was pretty good, which surprised me, because I am a very literal person. When I look at movies, I really want to look at biography, and this is not biography. It’s biopic, where the producers create an arc and move to whatever conclusion they want.
Did the early scenes, especially the Greenwich Village scenes, feel true to your experience?
The feeling, the tone, yes. I think they captured a lot of it quite well. Coffeehouse scenes, Village streets. That’s not exactly what it looked like, but it doesn’t matter.
I was curious about the coffeehouses specifically. Did they actually look like Gaslight and Gerde’s?
It was close enough. It was the feel rather than, did the Gaslight have those kinds of light fixtures, or were the tables in that scene arranged in three rows front to back the way the Gaslight tables were arranged? I don’t even remember what the Gaslight tables looked like. It had the look of the inside of a club.
But, depending on what scenes you’re talking about, I have problems with a lot of it, because I’m not looking dispassionately at history and saying, “Oh, somebody changed the history.” I am looking at portrayals of friends—and, in a way, portrayals of me, even though I’m not in it. It almost isn’t even a question of accuracies or inaccuracies, but of changes or distortions of people.
Dave is in the movie briefly a couple times. Did you know going in that there would be a Dave Van Ronk character?
I did. I saw the movie twice. The first time I didn’t even realize that that guy was David. It just went right by me. I think he was there once later in a party. I saw somebody with hair hanging down like David, so I guess that was Dave.
He’s in there very early on, telling Bob where Woody Guthrie’s hospital is. Plus that one line later at a party.
My feeling about that is, and this is a little difficult to explain, but Bob is on his way into New York to meet his hero. His hero is somebody who is part of a world that he’s going to leave. He’s coming into the folk music world, which he is going to leave for a different musical world. Dave is there to greet him before he even gets there. Dave is never seen again. The way David was set up, to me, it was like saying, “This guy is part of the world that Dylan is going to leave, which is a failing world.” I thought that the way it was done was insulting to Dave.
The only really political scene is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is portrayed I think quite well. They show the fear. People were really, really scared that night. They were terrified that they weren’t going to be alive the next morning. That the whole thing was going to just be gone. The movie shows Bob working in the Gaslight that night with a very small group of people riveted, listening to him. Then Joan Baez running to be with him because Suze is away.
Aside from the Joan piece, Dave was working in the Gaslight the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The audience was small; Dave usually packed the Gaslight. People didn’t go out that night. They didn’t go to hear musicians. It was a small crowd, but the small crowd were people who were riveted listening to David, as they are shown riveted listening to Bob in the movie.
I think that it was insulting for them to replace David. It was like Dave didn’t exist.
You’re saying that was Dave’s story, playing the Gaslight during the Cuban Missile Crisis, not Bob’s?
I was there. It was my story too. A piece of my life is erased in some way. I wasn’t a performer, but it was an important night in my life. It was an important night in the life of anybody else who happened to be in that room. They didn’t have to do that.
You mentioned there wasn’t too much politics in the movie. One scene I got more out of having read your book right beforehand is when the Suze character [named “Sylvie” in the film] encourages him to be more political, to get more into activism. There’s some line like, “You don’t need to be singing songs about the Dust Bowl. There’s issues happening right now you can write about.”
He did to a certain extent, in his own way. As a songwriter, Bob evolved brilliantly. He started by writing rapportage, whether it was about past events or present events. He moved into writing metaphor, which no one else was doing, or not doing well.
The movie, however, totally ignores the whole Civil Rights movement. It just ain’t there. That’s what I went back to see. I went back to see the movie because I said, “Am I really correct? Did this movie simply skip that whole thing?” This was years of really important political conflicts that were going on. It did show him singing at the March on Washington, which was an important event.
You were there right?
I was at the March. Dave was supposed to sing. He got sick, but he urged me to go. I was up on the platform, not because of who I was, but because of Dave.
Bob was not a political person in my terms. I was a committed, active Marxist. Our friends in the folk music world weren’t, for the most part. That was another really important part of my life and Dave’s life. But Bob was not uninvolved with what was going on. He did go South at one point. All of this was just totally ignored. It’s like it didn’t happen. In the movie, he comes to New York, he lives at a distance from this changing, growing Civil Rights movement. He goes to where a lot of people regard as its pinnacle, the ’63 March on Washington, and that’s it.
One line from your book I thought was interesting was that he would come to your apartment and you and Dave would tell him all this political theory, what you were passionate about. You felt the theory part he was uninterested in. It was more specific events that resonated for him. The story of Hattie Carroll, say, rather than concepts about Marxism, socialism, capitalism.
I didn’t know anybody from the folk music world who was really interested in the Marxist stuff that Dave and I spouted. That really wasn’t part of it. There were people who had been part of left-wing movement years ago; even they weren’t that interested in it anymore.
In Chronicles, when Dylan writes about you, he says a version of the same thing. He writes, “She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics. Not so much the political issues but rather the theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics.” It goes on for a little while.
Did he say Nietzschean or Marxist?
“Nietzschean politics.”
No. No way. I couldn’t tell you anything about Nietzsche.
The anecdote he shares after is about you two walking by a store. He’s saying how you’re anti-materialist and you say, “What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener. Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?”
I read that.Did I say that? I have no idea. I could have.
Let’s rewind a little bit. In terms of your own story, talk about how you entered the Village folk scene and how you met Dave, before Bob even comes into the picture.
I backed into it through left-wing politics. I went to Brooklyn College, and when I was in college I actively sought out organizations that were left-liberal. I went to socialist meetings every Friday night, and all of the left-wing organizations met in the Village. I had been going to the Village with a high school friend even before that. I had heard some of the folk music in the Square on Sundays so I had a little bit of that background. I was very young.
Are we talking late ’50s now?
We’re talking mid-’50s. I graduated from high school in June ’55. I’m going to these socialist meetings in the Village in ’56, early ’57. I am accosted and interviewed and grilled by the FBI. I tell them to go away.
Just for going to the meetings, the FBI is on you?
All I was doing was going to meetings. I knew a lot less about the organizations they were asking me about than they did. This was the tail end, during the McCarthy period. I remember these guys walked up to me on the street. They said, “Terri,” and they showed me their FBI cards. Without even blinking an eye, I looked at them and I said, “I won’t name names.”
During the McCarthy period, people were summoned to Washington and asked to name people they knew who were involved in the Communist Party. I only knew people in socialist organizations, not the Communist Party.
Anyway, I was going to these meetings, and the world was very small back then. There were only a few hundred people in it. The socialists knew the folk singers, knew the science fiction people, knew the visual artists. Everybody hung out in the Village. That’s how I backed into folk music.
I met David at a science fiction party. We talked for a while. I didn’t see him again for several months, and then I ran into him in the Figaro, which was a coffeehouse that everybody I knew hung out in. We were together for another 11 years.
What precipitated you becoming his manager?
David hated business. David wouldn’t set foot in the bank. When we started to live together, I had to talk him into being on the checking account. He hated that. He just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
He would just be keeping all his money hidden somewhere?
He didn’t have any money! There was nothing to keep. Starting a checking account was wishful thinking.
He had this gig in a new club somewhere not too far from Philadelphia. [The club] was bombing; it wasn’t attracting an audience. It was pretty obvious that he wasn’t going to get paid, because they weren’t making any money. We called his manager. His manager said, “Work out the gig.” It was a perfectly reasonable thing to tell him. Work out the gig, and then we’ll…what? We’ll sue? I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the adage “you sue a beggar and you get lice.”
But he did it. He worked out the gig. He didn’t get paid. He fired his manager because he was pissed with him. Why did he hire me? I don’t know. I was there.
How do you learn the ropes? You’re not a manager, until suddenly you are.
You wing it. It was not such a big deal then. There weren’t an awful lot of commercial managers around. You had Albert Grossman, who was an up-and-coming commercial manager. You had Harold Leventhal, who was a very experienced, incredibly honest manager in New York. You had Manny Greenhill in Boston. Basically, in the beginning, I was a booking agent. I just called clubs and got gigs. It really was trial and error.
I was not the kind of manager who tried to change his music or the way my clients looked or acted or teach them stagecraft. I just took them as they were. Some people sent their clients to learn how to dress better or speak better. I didn’t do any of that.
When I managed, a good deal of what I did was PR. My clients had a ton, given the time, of publicity. I did an enormous amount of public relations for them. I had interviews, I had press coverage, everywhere they went.
What does public relations look like in the early ’60s? You’re writing press releases? You’re inviting reporters to shows?
At that point, it was both. I looked up who and what newspaper or what magazine would be interested in folk music. There were damn few people, of course. I had lists of names. I had phone numbers. I called them. If I went to another city, I met them. I did all that shit that a good PR person I thought was supposed to do, which was personal. I didn’t just send press releases. As a matter of fact, I barely even knew what a press release was.
I remember, I think it was 1964, there was a thing called the New York Folk Festival. David did the blues concert. He brought in Chuck Berry, who had gotten out of jail a while before and had not been around for very long. There was a guy who did PR. I saw the press releases and I said, “Oh, that’s what they do.” I had just always done letters and phone calls and personal shit.
Were journalists generally interested in a new folk artist?
No, they weren’t. By ’64, ’65, there was some interest. Before that, outside of New York, it was rough. It really was. I put a lot of time and work into that, and I was good. When I stopped managing, I did public relations for not-for-profit organizations for years.
Where you pitching Robert Shelton, or was he plugged in enough on his own?
He was around. He was very aware of what was going on in the folk music world. It wasn’t a question of nagging him very much. He knew who was there.
Was Bob your second client after Dave?
Yes, he was. That was ’61. I had just started to work with Dave.
There’s a scene in your book where Dave has seen this kid out in one of the clubs, and he comes back to the apartment and calls him a “fucking genius. Then you go out and see him and you agree. What about that early phase of Bob Dylan made you and Dave think he was a “fucking genius”?
People ask, and my answer is always, “I don’t know.” He stumbled a little bit and he looked cute and he doffed his cap and he walked and acted a bit like Charlie Chaplin. He was not a great guitarist. He was not a great singer, but something– I can’t put my finger on it, what there was about him.
It wasn’t only Dave and me who thought that. Within weeks, that guy started to become the most photographed folk singer in Greenwich Village. Other folk singers were more enthusiastic about him than they were about anybody else.
This is even before he’s writing his own songs too.
Yes, those first months. This wasn’t in the rest of the country or the rest of the East Coast, where he wasn’t yet known. This was in the Village.
How do you go from being a fan to being his manager?
He says to me one day, “Would you get me gigs?” We talk about it. I say, “Do you want me to manage you?” He says, “Yes.” We work out a verbal arrangement. Never occurred to me to ask him to sign a contract. I wasn’t that professional yet.
Initially, all I’m going to do is try and get him some work because he has to earn a living. I needed something to play for potential employers and club owners, so I cut a tape at the Gaslight. I took it to Philadelphia and I took it to Boston and I took it to Saratoga Springs. Everybody said, “Go away.”
When you say “took it,” are you making copies and mailing it out? Are you physically showing up to people’s offices?
I went to Boston. Richard Farina and Carolyn Hester were married at that time, and they were playing Springfield, Massachusetts, and then Boston. I went with them and I brought this little cassette and I played it for people. Philadelphia, I may have sent the cassette, or I may have gone down there when David was playing Philadelphia.
Everybody said, “Go away,” and so I went away. He did not come across well yet on tape. I was able to get him gigs in a couple of bars in New Jersey. I haven’t a clue how I did that.
Was it a proper show you recorded the Gaslight tape at?
It was a show; there was an audience. I think it was an evening that we set up as a booking, but I honestly wouldn’t swear to it.
There are six songs on the tape. Was that his typical repertoire around the time?
Yes, it was. Dave came on and did the chorus of “Car, Car.”
It’s funny that everyone’s passing on this tape because all these years later it’s so beloved and famous among Dylan fans.
Back then, no one was interested
It’s got “Song to Woody” on it, which I think a lot of people consider his first major composition. The movie treats it that way.
I think the tape is very good for what it is and the sounds on it. I have the original tape which will go up for auction one of these days. The sound is stunning. Because it’s such an old tape, I thought the sound would’ve dissolved, but it’s incredible. It’s just gorgeous
L-R: Unknown, Suze Rotolo, Terri Thal, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk