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A hallucination of the dope racket as shredder of youth, customarily coupled with Reefer Madness yet boasting a kernel of grimly impoverished integrity that wards off campy derision. The trajectory is from rural diner to the Dead Rat Cafe and beyond, a toot of "the grandest headache medicine in the world" kicks off the slide of the naïve shopgirl (Lois January) who turns woozy moll for a slick pusher (Noel Madison). Her brother (Dean Benton) comes looking for her and gets hooked himself, heading off to cocaine shindigs with a drive-in waitress (Sheila Manners) who teaches him the lingo: "I'm gonna take you on a sleigh ride with the snowbirds!" "Sleigh ride? Snowbirds? In summer?!" A joyriding socialite (Lois Lindsay) completes the hophead quartet as shadows fall on their faces. The luster gone from the whoopee-makin', Benton shivers in a filthy bed while taking money from Manners, who's just back from a night of walking the streets. The decayed quality of celluloid itself becomes an accidental embodiment of physical and spiritual erosion, with missing frames working like razory jump cuts, shoddy lighting supplying a pervasive chiaroscuro, and the garbled soundtrack further choking out the voices of the damned. The static, unbroken tableau of the pregnant addict's suicide (oven turned on, towel stuffed under door, lights turned off) lingers suspended between Griffith's The Struggle and Ray's Knock on Any Door, displaying more honesty than all the pyrotechnics of Requiem for a Dream combined. With Eddie Phillips, Charles Delaney, Frank Shannon, and Fay Holden. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |