USA,
1972, 100 min
Shown in 1972
CREDITS
- dir
-
Paul Morrissey
- prod
-
Andy Warhol
- cam
-
Paul Morrissey
- cast
-
Sylvia Miles, Joe D’Alessandro, Andrea Feldman, Pat Ast, Eric Emerson, Gary Kosnotchka, Bonnie Glick
- source
-
Levitt-Pickman Film Corporation
-
COMMENTS
Part of the New Directors series. Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol in person.
OTHER
A sort of homage to Hollywood past and present, Paul Morrissey’s latest film, Heat, was the hit of the Directors Fortnight during this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It is a rueful comedy that vaguely resembles the situation described in Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, and a brief title at the beginning of the film strikes a proper note of regret about the glamor of decades past: “In 1971, another studio, the Fox lot on Sunset Boulevard, was torn down.” And there, glooming in the ruins, is the famous Ganymede of Mr. Morrisey’s previous films, the young actor, Joe D’Allesandro. He plays an ex-child star named Joe, who has found it difficult to make a comeback, and who has taken refuge in one of those greenleafed motels, where unemployed drifters temporarily imagine themselves to be in the Garden of Allah. The other residents of this place include two young women, Jessica and Bonnie, living in Sapphic bliss with the former’s illegitimate baby; two adolescent brothers in show business (they sing, dance and do a sex act) and a large termagant, who acts as the motel’s proprietress. As usual, the laconic Joe attracts all these individuals, and is not adverse to “getting it on” with any of them, until by chance, he meets Jessica’s mother, a movie actress named Sally Todd. The affair between Sally and Joe becomes the central action of the film and the actress Sylvia Miles is magnificent as the volatile, worldly-wise Sally, expressing in every line and gesture that acidulous sardonicism underlying movie fame. Heat is a comedy of the sexes. It aims toward laughter, but the social criticism is there, too. Actually, the film may occasionally seem to be populated by intellectual and moral cretins, until one recognizes their ultimate reality in a suddenly truthful sequence. Morrissey balances the grotesque with the commonplace and that is, perhaps, what the world of Hollywood’s strugglers, misfits and hustlers has really been, ever since pies were thrown in Edendale.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #384
Henry Fonda attended the SFIFF in 1967 to receive a tribute for his work in classics like The Grapes of Wrath and 12 Angry Men. Daughter Jane showed up in 1975 for a tribute of her own. And her brother Peter made two Festival appearances, one as a guest in 1963 and another to accompany the film Nadja (in which he gleefully portrayed Dr. Van Helsing) in 1995.
