Tom Waits for No One (1979) User Reviews

A little 70s gem

[Rectangular_businessman · 8/10 · 26 May 2022]

This was my introduction to Tom Waits music: Personally, I think the video fits the song as a glove, capturing perfectly well its mood from beginning to end.

A shame John Lamb apparently hasn't directed anything else, I think it would have been very interesting to see more stuff done with this same style.

It really helps to like Waits' jazzy Nighthawks-era stuff, otherwise it is just a curio

[bob the moo · 31 January 2014]

I was drawn to this animation by the pun title and the use of Tom Waits himself. I find the man's music to be so variable and can be moved and love one track only the next to find myself wondering what the hell mess was that Fozzy Bear appeared to be stumbling over. Luckily for me I do quite like the low jazzy lounge lizard stuff that he did on Nighthawks at the Diner and similar albums and I mention this because this is the style that the song used here is in. The track is "The One That Got Away" and it plays out in a rumbling low jazzman style while the animation shows Tom Waits and an undressing teasing beauty on a dark street.

The music is good if you like this track (which I mostly do – not his best for sure but enjoyable) and it at least works with the animation. Visually the film is technically impressive as it was rotoscoped; animated frame by frame on top of a filmed live images. Problem is that the movement and content doesn't really change and once the novelty of an animated Waits starts to fade there is not too much else coming in to take its place. Waits fans will like it as much for the track as the animation, but those who don't care for the music will find almost nothing else here to really like other than it being a curio.

absolutely sublime time capsule- now available online!

[Quinoa1984 · 10/10 · 17 September 2007]

While the song that Tom Waits performs in this little animated short- done in a style somewhat reminiscent of Bakshi's rotoscoping ala American Pop (however far more cool and, unlike what Bakshi offered, a jazz tune)- may not be as outstanding as the stuff he presented on albums like Rain Dogs and Mule Variations, for his Nighthawks/Heart of Saturday Night period it's one of his very best. You can feel the sense of poetry and the sweet, cool and slightly sullen side to the 70s Waits in the song, and the animation brings it out tenfold, opening with a lonely saxophone and Waits out in on a street at night in his inimitable style of movement.

The song that plays is "The One That Got Away", which is more of a riffing song lyrically, as if one could imagine him having recorded the song in-between the best drinks in the world, next to the hottest woman in the dive. In actuality (as the you-tube page which now plays the short states), it was performed live and then animated over in 1978, as a kind of burlesque (or as erotic Waits can get) tale of lust was played out with a dancer in a long silk dress and great black hair, soon stripping down. It ends in a freeze frame of Waits under a streetlight, abandoned by the temptress, and in a state that could be comparable to many a song Waits performed at the time: tales of the night, of booze-laden encounters, love or lust lost, and yet always done in a mood that's so cool you'd swear the old jazz gods like Davis and Coltrane were shaking their fists in envy.

As any kind of Tom Waits fan, even if not as heavily into the jazz stuff as his more 'what-in-the-hell-was-that-it-was-awesome' period of the past twenty-five years, it's a must-see.