‘The Connection’ Is Far Removed From the Cinema of Its Time

This film version of Jack Gelber’s one-room, real-time play The Connection takes place in a Greenwich Village loft that, although grungy and low-down, now presents every speck of dirt and every cockroach with a clarity probably unseen since 1961, if then. As a time capsule alone, the film’s historical and stylistic perspective is fascinating.

This movie belongs to an independent universe far removed from the mainstream cinema of its year. The mixed black and white cast of characters are marginal, unappealing figures to straight society or even to themselves, as they are given to fits of anger, bitter dispute, or maudlin anguish. They’re all dope addicts waiting for Cowboy (Carl Lee), their slim, super-cool, African-American “connection”, to arrive in his white chinos and black sunglasses, bearing heroin. This makes the first part of the drama seem like an American answer to Waiting for Godot, except that their anti-savior shows up.

The pad is rented by a white, whining junkie appropriately called Leach and played by Warren Finnerty, who seems to be uncannily channeling Steve Buscemi 30 years ahead of time. His weedy New York and/or countercultural presence also manifested in The Pawnbroker, Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider and The Panic in Needle Park.

Horrors! The characters say “shit”, which led to the film being denied a New York exhibition license until producers Clarke and Lewis Allen successfully appealed in court. The word was ruled vulgar but not obscene, a legal milestone of sorts. That’s why the film, which debuted at Cannes in May 1960, didn’t open in New York until October 1962. This is the sort of legal fight that American indie filmmakers took on throughout the ’50s and ’60s while the Hollywood studios stood by and benefited.

The writing and self-conscious performing are the most dated elements of the film, which is technically a marvel of vigorous black and white photography (by Arthur J. Ornitz), mischievous editing (by Clarke), and divine jazz of the classic Five Spot/Village Vanguard era performed onscreen by composer-pianist Freddie Redd (interviewed in the most interesting extra), saxman Jackie McLean, drummer Larry Ritchie, and upright bassist Michael Mattos. The movie achieves existential heaven during those jams.

The most ingenious, cinematic, and influential conceit is that the whole thing is being shot as a documentary with two cameras, although it does indulge moments of conventional editing that give the game away in the last half, such as when the elderly, befuddled, touching Sister Salvation (Barbara Winchester) is talking with slumming intellectual Solly (Jerome Raphael) about a Harold McNulty, and when Leach shoots up in what’s basically the non-graphic “money shot”.

Carl Lee, the son of actor/boxer Canada Lee, is the most vital presence in the film, a glamorous stereotype of the hip cat. He’d appear in Clarke’s The Cool World and later in The Landlord and Super Fly, eventually dying of a heroin overdose in what sounds like an unfortunate extreme of “the Method”.

Also in the film is William Redfield, a child actor whose long career ended with leukemia shortly after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which can be seen as a spiritual descendant. He plays the naive, earnest, uptight, visibly nervous young white filmmaker who’s shooting this alleged documentary, and who worries that there’s “something dirty” about peeking into people’s lives without joining in the moral degradation — so he does. Margaret Mead, he ain’t. Roscoe Lee Brown, who put his patrician voice and manner to good use in a long career, plays the black cameraman, a liminal and faintly trixterish figure between the movie’s worlds and races. He supposedly takes over the film after the director abandons it.

Other supporting players include Garry Goodrow as a thieving rat, Jim Anderson as a sleepy cat, and Henry Proach as a shambling, silent, symbolic figure. The Blu-ray’s extras including silent home-movie footage and a short conversation with art director Albert Brenner, who explains that he got the job via “supervising” production designer Richard Sylbert, who didn’t participate directly but got a credit, and that everyone thought Clarke was too bossy.