Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is probably the worst concert film that I ever seen, and that is a huge disappointment, considering the fact David Bowie's live shows on this tour were legendary. But based on this movie, they kind of sucked.
I've often maintained that while it had several great songs on it, the Ziggy Stardust concept album was not the rock and roll masterpiece many critics claim it to be. It doesn't really have much narrative cohesion and starts to run out of gas on Side Two (with the exception of "Hang On To Yourself"). I always thought that perhaps the live shows on the tour, performed with Bowie in costume, would be a more exciting experience and be truer the Ziggy Stardust concept.
But instead of the huge sci-fi spectacle I expected, this movie presents Bowie and his small band singing mostly in place. Bowie's charisma is strong, but nothing outside of the realm of the usual rock star (he's no Jim Morrison) and the Ziggy tunes are sung all out of our, with even less of a narrative.
Of course, perhaps this concert, given on July 3rd, 1973 in England, the last of the tour dates, was really exciting if you saw it live. But D.A. Pennebaker, director of Don't Look Back and Monterary Pop, doesn't do much to get us in the mood. He doesn't use enough cameras to cover the action, meaning that most of the time we see Bowie in one interrupted shot, often from a distance so we don't see his facial expressions. The lighting cues of the concert (mostly just a red or blue spotlight on Bowie, with Spiders in near darkness), made it difficult to shoot and a lot of the footage is out of focus.
Also, the sound sucks. On the DVD's bonus features, Bowie's music producer Toni Visconti describes how the original recording was so bad that he Bowie had to go back and re-record much of the Spider's backing vocals. Perhaps it the fault of the recording and not the musicians, but none of these tunes sounds particularly good, and none are certainly better than the studio version. For me, the highlight of the set was hearing Bowie perform "All the Young Dudes", a song he wrote but never recorded in studio, but it's over too quickly.
The most interesting scene in the film occurs at the very beginning, as Bowie is getting made up his then wife, Angela, comes in and the two have a surreal conversation about his mother seeing a spaceship. Angela is very excited and has a great screen presence, so it's too bad that there little other backstage footage of any consequence.
At the end of the movie, Bowie famously tells the audience that this is the very last concert he will ever give. In interviews, Bowie claims that he was totally exhausted and really meant it at the time. By the time this movie was released (a full ten years after it was shot) he had already gone on multiple tours and released two live albums. This movie would have at least some merit as a historical document- had Bowie never toured again. Knowing that the artist would return, with better and more complete material makes this movie of what is supposedly his greatest accomplishment a bit sad in retrospect.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1983)