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"What you've seen tonight hasn't really happened... This is a cowboy fantasy out on the range." The groundwork is largely from Hawks, Red River and The Outlaw mainly, all Andy Warhol has to do is erode the cushions of genre to reveal the sexual blurs underneath. Shipping his New York hipster troupe to the Arizona prairie is a caprice that yields a splendidly haphazard mimesis of a narrative, couched in garbled technique that can't obscure its charming jokes. Joe Dallesandro, Louis Waldon and Eric Emerson are among the Factory cuties given Stetsons, studded belts and horses and dropped off in the middle of the crumby desert. The frontier town is as patently a phantom set as Ford's Shinbone in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Viva as the cattle queen runs the ranch with her "nurse" (Taylor Mead) and spits out lines in a flat, nasal whine that crumbles her grandeur. "Fine excuse for a monogamist you are!" When mythical icons of masculinity are paraded before the camera, a bout of grab-ass is more dangerous than a shootout—the fellas tousle each other's hair, do ballerina stretching exercises, jerk off broomsticks and mock-ejaculate beer cans. Popping strobe cuts are like cracks from the heroine's whip, the whoosh of an off-screen plane drowns out half the ad-libbed dialogue. The porch-stomping dance so central to sagebrush communes is recreated with the sheriff (Frankie Francine) in drag, "Magical Mystery Tour" is more to the gang's liking. "To hell with perversions, we're riding into the fucking sunset!" The next year has Joe Buck's dismayed query about John Wayne. Cinematography and editing by Paul Morrissey. With Julian Burrough, Tom Hompertz, and Allen Midgette.
--- Fernando F. Croce |