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A candid burlesque of Wilder's boulevard or rather an adjustment, the Tinseltown behind the opening credits is a demolition yard. "This L.A. is going to the dogs, but not here." The main image is a Hockney with bleach poured over it, a fleapit lorded over by a frizzy ogress (Pat Ast), fan imperiously in hand, shaking her head at the kooks in the pool. One of them is the slumming brat out of Hollywood High (Andrea Feldman), hater of men and lover of health snacks. Her disapproving mom (Sylvia Miles) is a faded chorine padding in bikinis and shades around a mansion previously owned by "a mad silent-film star." Pawed by these furies is the pimply object of desire himself, Joe Dallesandro as the juvenile star grown into a washed-up musician—he coasts on sexy torpor and ends up in the bed of the tanned diva, who interrupts their lovemaking to check her makeup and wonder if she was a good actress. "Will you stop with these fantasies already?" Paul Morrissey goes West, scraping off the old fable's Gothic veneer to let the exploitation and the neediness bake in the sun. (Cassavetes is roughly concurrent with the screwball vantage of Minnie and Moskowitz.) Just as the studied drabness of a living-room tableau is brightened by the entrance of a dapper queen's pet leopard, so is Dallesandro's placid poise nearly thrown by Feldman's witchy cackle. The camera wanders across the motel patio and zooms in on a patch of sallow skin so that cigarette burns loom like craters, further along is the towheaded fapper in Baby Jane getup. (He and his brother have an incestuous nightclub act, "it's a living.") A jammed gun underwater at the climax is the ultimate joke on the gulf between movie memory and seedy reality. With Eric Emerson, Ray Vestal, Lester Persky, and Harold Stevenson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |