When the film "The Last Waltz" was released in 1978 the rock music press lost itself in comparisons of the performances of the rock group. The Band's many famous guest artists, while movie critics, for the most part, considered it only a concert film. Few critics saw the film as an integral part of director Martin Scorsese's continuing body of work. In reappraising "The Last Waltz," its rich visual imagery and dark expressionistic style, along with the characteristic treatment of the few women who appear in the movie, mark this concert film as unmistakably the work of Martin Scorsese. Scorsese himself has said that he conceived "The Last Waltz" as an opera. Individual musical numbers are interspersed with interviews of the members of The Band, so that the music serves a dual function, as music and as narrative. The performers are characterized both by their performances and by their idiosyncratic clothes. Filmed as if singing and playing for themselves, each performer seems to exist within the vacuum of his or her own sexual or personal vision. Sometimes called an elegy, "The Last Waltz" is an elegant visual record of a celebration tinged with a sense of loss. (NKA)