waiting for the cowboy
by
Douglas Messerli
Jack
Gelber (script), Shirley Clarke (director) The
Connection / 1961
Based on the 1959 play by brilliant
off-Broadway writer, Jack Gelber (see my piece in My Year 2003), Clarke’s film uses the characters who are supposedly
filming the men waiting in a run-down
apartment for their next fix, to create a sense of watching a documentary about
a documentary, particularly when the unseen cameraman (with the voice of Roscoe
Lee Brown) refuses to turn off his camera while the director (William Redfield)
coaxes the addicts to “just be themselves” and adjusts the various lights and
microphones strategically laced through the room.
The angriest of these is Ernie, who
challenges and taunts the director, Dunn, and, along with others, insists that
if he is going to watch them shoot up, then he also—pretend hipster that he
is—should take a dose of heroin. And later, Dunn does just that, immediately
growing sick even as he continues “capturing” the events.
Each of these figures gets a chance to
talk, just as the jazz musicians all get an opportunity to show off their
musical talents before Cowboy (Carl Lee) arrives, surprisingly along with an
elderly woman called Sister Salvation, who might, we first might imagine, be
hooked as well, but whom, we soon perceive, is completely unable to even grasp
what is going on—which merely emphasizes the strangeness of a group of men all
gathered together in a small room, pacing in anticipation. Dunn, evidently, has
paid for this fix.
It is hard to imagine in 1961 (and even
earlier at The Living Theatre in 1959) that such a no-nonsense approach to
drugs would be even possible. Clarke’s gritty film however was banned after
just two performances, not because of its subject but by of the use (about 12 times)
of the word “shit,” referencing the drug not its bodily meaning. Yet, of
course, it is in the bathroom where each of them gets their shot by Cowboy, and
their degradation in that act is apparent.
Clarke appealed the court decision, and
eventually won, but by that time the film has lost its underground appeal. And
it was reviewed badly in The New York
Times, despite having garnered acclaim in its original showing at
Cannes.
Today, we might almost be witnessing an
historical encounter that thousands of middle-class people now intact, in cars,
shopping center and restaurant bathrooms, and at home, apparently, every day.
But in 1961 most Americans had never before even imagined such a scenario, let
alone seen it played out in a film or on a stage.
A strange none: in the original
production, which included some audience involvement, actor Martin Sheen played
“the man in the audience.”
I’d love to have seen that play, and I
wish I might have included it in Mac Wellman and my anthology, A New American Drama: 1960-1995; Mac had
wanted to include The Connection, but
I stubbornly held to our arbitrary 1960 date. Today I cannot imagine a better
production than Clarke’s, whose black-and-white rendering parallels Sidney
Lumet’s film of Long Day’s Journey into
Night of the very next year.
Los Angeles,
March 16, 2017
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