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The hophead's grin of comic horror: "Kinda think of myself as an artist." The main event is George Segal's whirligig of hipsterisms in the face of looming disaster, played in the heightened grain of Ivan Passer's razory New York City. The antihero is a former hairdresser turned sewer hepcat chasing his next fix of smack. The title is tattooed on his arm amid syringe craters, his junkie wife (Paula Prentiss) greets him at the pimp's dive with a slurring "Why doncha give me a call sometime?" The girlfriend (Karen Black) is "nice, straight," she meets him when he tries to break into her car and accommodates him into the abyss. Two sequences give the measure of the story. In one, the protagonist is stripped and locked in a dealer's nightmarishly burgundy bedroom, he dons frilly pegnoir, flashes the neighbor across the window, and saunters away with stogie in mouth when the police burst in following a complaint. In the other, his planned beachfront interlude with Black is mercilessly exposed as the escape fantasy it is, faced with dirty water and pale sand and the pangs of addiction he buries his face in her arms. The Czech filmmaker is fascinated by American rootlessness, by the way people seem free yet lost—hunched on a bench after having failed to betray his supplier, Segal is framed with marquees announcing "Playland" and "Sudden Terror" over his shaggy head. Times News Square through a grubby long lens, pungent early roles for Robert De Niro, Hector Elizondo and Burt Young, perfect on a double-bill with Schatzberg's The Panic in Needle Park. "Come back home with me," Black pleads, though, as with other heartfelt early Seventies studies, the very notion of "home" has long become precarious. With Jay Fletcher, Ed Madsen, and Marcia Jean Kurtz.
--- Fernando F. Croce |