Like many of the gritty old American experimental films that the intrepid resurrectionists over at Milestone have been unearthing, spit-shining, and gift-wrapping for eager cinemaphiles of late, Shirley Clarke's The Connection is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's a riveting and adventurous spectacle of Lost Bohemia, riddled with junkie-artiste stream-of-consciousness and graced with a blow-the-roof-off jazz soundtrack. On the other, it's the worst kind of terribly determined mid-century American neo-realism, all mannered non-sequiturs and straining self-importance. (If nothing else, this is a film that tries hard at everything it does.) The sheer vivacity and discipline of vision that Clarke brings to this long-unseen and once controversial film wins out over its many negatives, but it's a close thing.]]>
Clarke adapted the film from a 1959 play by Jack Gelber that was something of a love-it-or-hate-it downtown New York sensation at the time. Gelber's play was about a raggle-taggle apartment full of Greenwich Village junkies hanging out and waiting for their connection, a guy named Cowboy, to show up with their fix. While waiting, they haggle and maunder, talking the nonsense that junkies talk. (If the film had been shot a few years later, you could imagine the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man" playing in the background: "He's never early, he's always late / First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait.") Then, once Cowboy arrives, it's not at all what they expected.
In her version, Clarke--one of the great American underground filmmakers who has been mostly lost to time--opened up the concept by adding a film-within-a-film. In the midst of the junkies' beatnik babble, a director puffed up on ideas of cinema verite realism tries to orchestrate them into his vision of documentary reality. He gripes at the cameraman, who answers back in kind from behind the screen, and then grabs his own handheld camera to get different angles. While the two of them alternate shots in a self-referential ruckus (the filmstrip itself occasionally breaks down), the less verbose junkies occasionally pick up their instruments and burst into brilliant song: of course there's a jazz band hanging out there.
The structure is creaky and feels overly borrowed; a hipster soundtrack of beat lingo and cool jazz grafted on to a sub-Beckett conceit and spiced up with some Ionesco-style absurdity. It's easy to get lost in the whirling soliloquies here, particularly when it comes to the loudest addict of them all: Leach. Described by one of the others as being "a queer without being queer," Leach complains about all the "creeps" hanging around his pad, and seems more desperate for a fix than most. Then, when he finally gets his hands on some heroin, Clarke's camera zooms close in on the needle slipping in, the blood, the clenched-fist excitement. It's a raw treatment, the sort of thing that makes what Otto Preminger was doing with addict a few years earlier in
The Man with the Golden Arm seem almost laughably sanitized.
The occasional curse word and (for the time) unfiltered look at the addicts' sweaty desperation caused problems for The Connection when it first opened. After a positive reception at Cannes in 1961, censorship problems in New York caused the film to be shut down after only two screenings (the projectionist was even arrested). Then, when the film finally received a true release, it sputtered and died--perhaps not surprisingly for such a spiky avant-garde work. This was never a film that was going to have any sizable kind of audience, and that's partially for good reasons. However, there's a lot of great worth to be seen here, whether it's Clarke's elegant handling of this tight space and choreographing around the wild, whooping jazz riffs or her sly satire on the filmmaker characters' pretensions of realism and the evocation of a long-passed subculture. Exhausting and occasionally juvenile, The Connection is, nevertheless, an experience.
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