This is a revived version of a Line Out post about Shirley Clarke's 1961 film, The Connection (these posts were purged from the internet after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog).
- Milestone Films
(Shirley Clarke, US, 1961, 35mm, 110 mins)
"Sordid and disagreeable."
—Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
The Connection is a jazz film and a film about junkies. Not all jazz films revolve around substance abuse, but many do, namely Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm and Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight.
In her first feature, the fearless Shirley Clarke (Cool World, the Oscar-winning Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World)
shuns the heretofore glamorized, Hollywood image of the drug addict.
These guys, who frequent the same Manhattan tenement, are a
motley-looking bunch, even though den father—and Steve Buscemi lookalike—Leach (Obie winner Warren Finnerty) prides himself on his housekeeping skills.
Though
Leach sports a stylish neckerchief, it's just his attempt to hide a
boil. If he can't stop talking, his compatriots spend most of their time
nodding off. Soon, fictional filmmaker Dunn (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's William Redfield) steps in
front of the camera to get them to "act naturally," but they see no
point unless he pays them more. Since he already gave them cash to shoot
up, ethics don't seem too high on his agenda.
- Milestone Films
- Set design by Richard Sylbert (The Manchurian Candidate, Rosemary's Baby)
The film-within-a-film's cinematographer, J.J. Burden
(The Liberation of L.B. Jones' Roscoe Lee Browne in his first film role), however, comes from their world, but left it behind
for greener climes. He serves as a mediator between the self-justifying
junkies and the self-justifying director.
Clarke shoots the
film, Jack Gelber's adaptation of his 1959 Living Theater play, like a
documentary, and the characters address the viewer as they would have
addressed a live audience (Finnerty was part of the original cast). It's unavoidably stagy, but she has fun with
the concept by keeping the camera moving, and when the gents jam on
saxophone, piano, drums, and stand-up bass—that's Jackie McLean on sax—it's easy to see why jazz fans embraced the soundtrack, even as the New York State Censorship Board cancelled the Manhattan run after only two screenings for "obscenity."
Clearly,
the Board didn't get it. Clarke, a dancer-turned-independent filmmaker,
was no finger-wagging moralist, then or ever. Her depiction of junkies may have been
more realistic than most up until that time, but the entire film serves as a distinct disincentive
to try the stuff. This is spelled out plainly by the tagline: "Men held captive
by the power of drugs."
- Milestone Films
- Blue Note recording artist Jackie McLean (1931-2006) on alto sax
This is only the second Clarke film I've seen after 1967's Portrait of Jason--not counting Agnès Varda's Lion's Love, in which she appears--where she takes an open-minded approach to her subject's homosexuality at a time when such things were either disguised or condemned. Similarly, when Leach's pals mention that he might be gay, they criticize his denial rather than his nature, though their views on women aren't quite so progressive.
I didn't know this going into it, but The Connection has more to do with junk than jazz, though it's worth noting that Clarke also directed 1985's Ornette: Made in America, her final film. By the way the men in her first feature look, I can only assume that it made a big impression on—or at least predicted—John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Jim Jarmusch, who have all dressed, played music, or made movies that reflect the same low-rent, bebop-beatnik world of pork pie hats and stained overcoats.
The Connection plays the Northwest Film Forum through Oct 25 as part of the 2012 Earshot Jazz Festival, Oct 19-28. More information here.
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