The Connection

United States

1962

105 Min

Color, Black and White

1.33:1

English

Currently 4.3/5 Stars.
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PROD Lewis M. Allen, Shirley Clarke

CAST Warren Finnerty, Jerome Raphael, Garry Goodrow, Jim Anderson, Carl Lee, Barbara Winchester, Henry Proach, Roscoe Lee Browne, William Redfield

The Connection depicts the same type of angel-headed hipsters that Kerouac coloured his books with, and is set in a one-room tenement where junkies, musicians, and other dudes await the arrival of the Cowboy. The Cowboy is their “Connection” who will provide them with their heroin fix. All the while, Clarke shows us a documentary filmmaker who wants to capture the hip scene encouraging his subjects to just “act naturally” in front of the camera. Like many other filmmakers and artists of the period, “acting naturally” is the key to Clarke’s work. In letting it all hang out, a new aesthetic seemed to sprout.

Clarke based The Connection on a Jack Gelber play of the same name, which was performed at the historic Living Theater in New York. Full of jump-cuts, sloppy camera-handling, and improvised dialogue, The Connection serves as a reminder that filmmaking can maintain an intoxicating chaos in spite of the very rigid technical limitations of the medium. The film may be short on plot and character development, but is technically innovative and reminds the viewer of the unlimited potential of cinema.

While Clarke was a highly innovative filmmaker on the level of experimental, cinematic virtuosos such as John Cassavettes and influential cinema verité practitioners such as the Maysles Brothers and D. A. Pennebaker, she undeservedly received less notoriety. Clarke shows an adept hand at jazz-like constructions of image and sound and the film’s recreation of a junkie haze is as intense as anything you’re likely to encounter from that era.

Clarke was a dancer and choreographer before she delved into cinema, and she has often been quoted as saying that her films were “a choreography of images”. The Connection is often a rambling, chaotic display of debauchery and suffers from over-hip pretensions. However, the wrangling of wild, spontaneous footage into a semi-cohesive form while still maintaining its authenticity and molding a narrative is what Clarke’s film pulls off.

Among some of the most memorable characters in the film are the sarcastic Leach, played convincingly by Warren Finnerty, and the super-cool Carl Lee as Cowboy. However, Clarke manages to elicit solid performances from all of the ensemble. The film quietly jangles the nerves as the characters descend into withdrawal.

Clarke’s film depicts a generation who seeks drugs and alcohol to assuage feelings of disillusionment. While certainly more objective than most social commentary, The Connection does have a social heartbeat. The dramatic situation it offers can be applied to a larger social context and lends itself to any number of interpretations about the hypocritical society that these characters inhabit. —sensesofcinema.com

Director

Shirley Clarke

American director Shirley Clarke planned to become a choreographer, staging her first dance recital at age 17. But the intricate movements of her dancers led Ms. Clarke to explore the possibilities of capturing those movements on celluloid— which in turn led her into film directing. At the time she started out (1953), Ida Lupino was Hollywood’s sole female mainstream film director, but Clarke was never interested in the mainstream. She filmed several dancing short subjects for a deliberately limited audience, then applied her choreographer’s skills to the rhythmic editing of her semi-documentaries Bridges Go Round (1959) and Skyscraper (1959). Always fascinated with the underside of life, Clarke scraped together funding for her first feature, The Connection (1961), a frank study of heroin addicts—so frank that it was banned by the New York State film censors. This film was something of an oddity in Ms. Clarke’s career in that it combined “real” people with… read more

American director Shirley Clarke planned to become a choreographer, staging her first dance recital at age 17. But the intricate movements of her dancers led Ms. Clarke to explore the possibilities of capturing those movements on celluloid— which in turn led her into film directing. At the time she started out (1953), Ida Lupino was Hollywood’s sole female mainstream film director, but Clarke was never interested in the mainstream. She filmed several dancing short subjects for a deliberately limited audience, then applied her choreographer’s skills to the rhythmic editing of her semi-documentaries Bridges Go Round (1959) and Skyscraper (1959). Always fascinated with the underside of life, Clarke scraped together funding for her first feature, The Connection (1961), a frank study of heroin addicts—so frank that it was banned by the New York State film censors. This film was something of an oddity in Ms. Clarke’s career in that it combined “real” people with such familiar professional performers as William Redfield and Roscoe Lee Browne, and because its story was based on a stage play rather than growing naturally from the filmmaking process itself. Shortly after establishing her own production company (Film-Makers Cooperative), Clarke won an Oscar for her 1962 documentary Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World which is still a staple of college literature classes. Her next feature, The Cool World (1963) was a years-before-its-time exploration of life in Harlem. Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), a two-hour interview with a black male prostitute, was widely reviewed by the American press, few of whom (except for the smaller, esoteric publications) found any value in it; it expectedly fared better in Europe, the birthplace of cinema verite. Though castigated for her supposedly morbid viewpoint and the lack of production polish in her films, Clarke was wooed by Hollywood in the late 1960s. Alas, neither she nor the film capital could come to terms, and the result was several bitter years of frustration (Clarke’s recounting of her travails was filmed by Agnes Varda in the 1969 feature Lions Love). In the past two decades, Clarke has done her moviemaking on videotape, blazing creative trails for the MTV generation; she has also taught film courses at UCLA. A bloody but unbowed rebel, Clarke has continued to make films primarily for herself and her clique of enthusiasts. This may be why only one of Shirley Clarke’s films, The Connection, is listed in the otherwise exhaustive “establishment” reference work Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide. Following a protracted illness Clarke died in Boston on September 23, 1997 at age 78. —allmovie guide

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