Who Killed Teddy Bear?

This film is truly a work of art of the highest magnitude and no, i am not kidding. Shot in glorious, high-contrast black-and-white, it reeks of exploitation from the note of the cheesy theme song all the way through the strobe-cut ending and every horn-blaring, high-heeling, hip-grinding moment in between. Who Killed Teddy Bear? is sleaze cinema with a Freudian twist and a healthy shot of vintage NYC atmosphere.

Sal Mineo plays a busboy obsessed with aspiring actress/club DJ Juliet Prowse, coming off like a perverted puppy dog. Star dancer and former Sinatra fiancee Prowse is at her foxiest in this one, with her pencil skirts, kitten heels and cat eyes, thus it's no surprise that the lady is being stalked by an obscene caller and the phone call bits--all heavy breathing, bulging tightywhiteys and sweat--will make you want to leave the theatre and take a shower.... Well, okay, you're not going anywhere until this is over. Shower later.

But who amongst Prowse's many admirers is it? Mineo seems likely. But there's also mod dyke club owner Elaine Stritch, who is eager to listen to Prowse's problems, let her stay overnight, fondle her fur (so to speak). Or the mute, staring doorman (This Lurch-like character is played by future Hill Street Blues police captain Daniel J. Travanti. I sometimes like to image the theoretical narrative trajectory that would turn one character in an actor's career into another but this is one I've never been able to conjure.) Or perhaps one of the many fans of her DJ gig -- back when being a DJ meant spinning vinyl in an evening gown...

Of course, the Joe Friday-like cop who is called upon to investigate Prowse's stalker has issues of his own --  obsessively playing audio tapes of various twisted criminals'confessions as his daughter listens wide-eyed from the other side of the door. The motif of the locked-away child -- or child-like -- female is also present in Mineo's mentally challenged kid sister, who hides in a closet, playing with the eponymous teddy bear.

Odd sexual tension and vaguely inappropriate relationships abound -- cop & victim, boss & employee, brother & sister, coworkers -- and the mix of titillating sleaze and psychological complexity is what sets Who Killed Teddy Bear? apart from other black-and-white 60's exploitation flicks. There's also the strong cast, evocative cinematography and intriguing plotline. And, of course, the protracted scenes of hip 60s clubgoers in cocktail dresses and suits dancing themselves into a sweaty frenzy. Listen, i love me some Bad Girls Go to Hell or Olga's Girls, but Who Killed Teddy Bear? is in a whole different class.

Sal Mineo is quite the slab of beefcake in this film --  dig the homoerotic protracted sequence of Sal working out at the gym, swimming in the pool and roaming the Deuce in a pair of tight, white hustler jeans. The puppy eyes and vulnerability that made Plato so endearing are still here, but Mineo also brings sexy and creepy. And how about the "twist lesson" that brings the film to it's climax (no pun intended)?

Another asset of this great piece of cinema are its New York City location shots, especially when Mineo goes walking the city at night, window shopping for porn, cruising and being cruised in scenes that must've influenced Taxi Driver -- actually, Michael Chapman, the assistant camera on Who Killed Teddy Bear? went on to become the cinematographer of Taxi Driver.

(As long as we're in the odd connections quadrant, may i also point out that Who Killed Teddy Bear director Joseph Cates was the father of actress Phoebe Cates, who was fetishistically filmed poolside in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and whose godmother was none other than Jacqueline Susann of Valley of the Dolls fame.) Also appreciate the William S. Burroughs titles mixed in with the pulps and the porn in the window of the "dirty bookshop."

I cannot recommend this movie highly enough. Who Killed Teddy Bear? remains hard to find for legal reasons i remain uncertain of, although there is a chunked, grainy dub on Youtube. So, should you run across a copy or a screening, be there!

Drive Angry

Ah, Nicholas Cage. Like the moon, chocolate melting for a ganache or an overly dramatic teenage girl, you have many phases. The cute guy in Valley Girl. The promising performer of The Cotton Club. The comedian of Raising Arizona. The leading man of Moonstruck. The edgy hero of Wild at Heart. The gifted actor of Leaving Las Vegas... then came The Wicker Man, Ghost Rider, Bangkok Dangerous and a seemingly weekly appearance in some of the worst motion pictures in recent history.

But there is a shining light amongst the low moments of this man's career: Drive Angry. Drive Angry is the best piece of Grindhouse schlock in years. Really, if you eliminate Robert Rodriguez's work in the genre (Planet Terror, Machete), no one has made such an inspired piece of crap in some time. Yes, it's better than Hobo With a Shotgun.

Okay, not a lot better, but better.

Cage plays Milton, a dead ex-con. Dead, as in not alive, and not alive as in, in Hell. Hell looks kind of like Gary, Indiana or maybe someplace with a lot of fracking ("The fire isn't the worst part. It's the video feed."), and Nicholas Cage busts out in a Buick Riviera.  We then cut to a small town in Colorado (its own kind of Hell) where three greasy, cussing rednecks in a rusted out pickup truck are being pursued by Nicholas Cage and his Buick Riviera. Just over two minutes in, we've got our first car chase, our first car crash, several shotgun deaths and a big explosion.

Undead Nicholas Cage has returned to a world of V-8 engines, tawdry motor courts and dingy dive bars where absolutely everyone is white trash. He meets a waitress, played by Amber Heard (somewhat reminiscent of gorgeous, tough 70's exploitation goddess Cheri Caffaro, whose Ginger movies i will get to eventually) who has a bitchin' '69 Dodge Charger and who takes no fucking bullshit off of anyone. No-Bullshit Waitress quits her job and joins up with Nicholas Cage on his quest to Drive Angry because... well, just because. Because do we really want more exposition here? Fuck no!

That's the dude who wrote this movie. No, really, it is.

We also meet The Accountant (William Fichtner, in one of those standout B-movie supporting roles that makes you long for a sequel dedicated just to this character), who has come from Hell to fetch Nicholas Cage back -- balancing the books and all that, apparently. He's got a sharp suit, an icy line of patter ("I won't see you until you're 73. You... I'll see in three months."), a mild taste for necessary sadism and a knack for impersonating an FBI agent at just the right time.

Courtesy of a flashback, we also learn that Nicholas Cage's daughter joined a Satanic cult, then quit the Satanic cult, then bit the head Satanist's dick off. The head Satanist looks like a cheap Tom Jones impersonator and talks like Foghorn Leghorn. It is no wonder that, as The Accountant later explains to us, Satan himself ("He's a quiet man -- thoughtful and well-read.") finds these Satanists quite distasteful indeed. I'm not sure what anyone would hook up with these people: They're mean, stupid, unattractive, drive shitty cars and their climactic Satan-summoning orgy looks more like a small-time Woodstock held in a junkyard -- lousy music, ugly naked people, domestic beer, no toilets....

Waitresses continue to hit on Nicholas Cage. (However, things between Nicholas Cage and No-Bullshit Waitress remain platonic, if not downright paternal.) This despite the fact that he looks like old unwashed David Carradine at the end of a five-day bender and fucks not only with all his clothes on, but his sunglasses as well. However, when a half-dozen armed thugs bust into the sleazy motel room, he can kill them all without pulling his prong out of the waitress du soir or dropping his bottle of Jack Daniels. It all happens in slow motion while the Raveonettes play!

I like Drive Angry because, as Toki says about the coked-up clown, it makes me laughs. Fucked-up shit happens that makes one chuckle, be it casual impalement on a broken baseball bat, a thug accidentally putting his machete through his own head or exploding cars number fourteen through twenty-two. Go, go Grindhouse!

The Satanists lure Nicholas Cage with a fake church service and then take off in their... Winnebago. Yes, the Satanists drive a Winnebago! Yes, there's a Charger/Winnebago car chase. Some more ass-kicking and shotgunning. Topless chicks with 45's. A sweet red Chevelle with racing stripes. And a melting skull and what i think is a black hole. And dialogue like:
"I am going to kill you. And then I am going to defile your corpse."
"But between now and then, I'm gonna fuck you up."

Can Nicholas Cage make it through the police roadblock? Roadblocks? Can Nicholas Cage pry a bullet out of his own eye socket? Will Nicholas Cage rescue his grandbaby from the Satanists? Will Nicholas Cage defeat Tom Jones Foghorn Leghorn Satanist and, as he so ardently hopes, "drink a beer out of his skull?"

Drive Angry is nothing is not a good fucking time at the movies. And, really, isn't that enough? My old sensei Bob Christgau used to point out that just having fun is one of the most sublime human experiences. Or something like that... But what do we have to look forward to next from Mr. Cage? Another ex-con out for vengeance flick. Not one but two movies where he needs to find his kidnapped daughter. A movie where he tracks a serial killer with the help of the girl from High School Musical. The voice of a prehistoric crocodile in a Dreamworks animation. A musical with Jack Black and Steve Carrell. At this rate, Drive Angry is gonna be the best work he does this decade.

Mad Youth

Sex, drugs and rock n' roll in movies didn't start in the sixties -- even in the thirties and forties, hookers, weed and lewd behaviour could be found in sleazy movie houses all over the country. Neither did the idea of the old movie star making a living in low-grade exploitation flicks begin with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Nope, as far back as the late thirties, Betty Compson was paying the bills with bottom-of-the-bill quickies. Compson had gotten her start in silents, working with everyone from Fatty Arbuckle to Lon Chaney to Josef Von Sternberg, even earning a best actress Oscar nomination. But after twenty years in the biz, the roles slowed down and her alcoholic husband hung her with taxes & debts and she wound up doing flicks like Escort Girl, Laughing at Danger and Mad Youth..

In Mad Youth, peroxided mom Betty and her peroxided daughter (played by frequent Three Stooges co-star Mary Ainslee -- she's supposed to be a teenager, but looks to be slightly on the north side of thirty) live on alimony and allowance in a posh apartment. Sitting at her art deco dressing table, Mom calls up her local escort agency -- where they know her, natch -- to send over "a nice young man for a bridge party." She hits up her daughter for cash to pay her "gigolo," Daughter says yes if she can have "the gang" over for an unsupervised house party. The ladies' bridge shindig is like a less witty but more raunchy and certainly less fashionable version of a gossipfest from The Women, the teen party is kind of like a Reefer Madness party but with jitterbugging instead of roaches -- for no reason, some chick shows up in the middle of it in full majorette drag and proceeds to do some kind of full twirling routine while tap dancing, which is a rather David Lynch moment. The adults get hammered, the kids play strip poker.

Mother hassles Daughter about not getting married and, more importantly, out of her way so that she can have hustlers, gigolos and assorted swingers over without compunction -- hey, we know kids always be crampin' your style. Daughter responds with a profound truth I wish I'd had as a stock response years ago: "I've never found a man I'd want to marry. The ones that'd make good family men are so dumb I can't stand them and the ones I like are so worthless I'd starve." Sums it up, really...

Anyway, Mom keeps calling the escort service for the Count, the Count decides he'd rather go out with Daughter. More jitterbugging ensues. Then we stop for a flamenco performance. And some bullfighting. Then more jitterbugging. There's a lot of this in old exploitation movies: Stopping dead for an unrelated musical number. Fills time, i guess and if an investor has a piece who's a baton twirler, well...

So, anyway, Daughter continues to run around with "the Count" (cue endless montage of diary entries and random nightclub stock footage and a long vist to a freakshow). In the meantime, Daughter's friend runs away from home rather than be sent to her uncle's farm ("... and the hicks, worst of all, the hicks."), choosing the far more rational option of becoming a mail-order bride.  Mom finds diary, realizes Daughter has been going to art deco nightclubs, "slumming in Chinatown" and visiting Coney Island magic shows with the Count and lays down some truthiness of her own: "I don't want to grow old. I want some of the good things in life I was cheated out of by a loveless marriage... I've always resented you. I never wanted you in the first place." Ooooooh....

Daughter takes off to visit friend who, of course, is now working in a whorehouse, where the usual old-movie white-slavery shakedown ensues. (No joke:  A white-slavery flick, Traffic in Souls was the first full-length American feature film, with innovative use of crosscutting and location shooting, as well as being the first crime movie.) The Count rescues the Daughter after a very awkward fistfight and a small speech celebrating bourgeois values -- "I got my American citizenship papers yesterday and I got a job. We'll get married and we can live like self-respecting, self-supporting Americans should." But, at the end, Mom is picking up the phone and calling the escort service for another "nice young college boy" and  Mad Youth is right back where we started.

Darktown Strutters

Psychedelic girl power biker flick blaxploitation surrealist craziness! Welcome to the weird, weird world of Darktown Strutters!

Whatta poster! Our heroine is Syreena, played by Trina Parks, who was so very memorable as Thumper in Diamonds Are Forever. She and her all-woman biker gang have come to Watts in search of Cinderella, Syreena's mother. And this is not just any ol' biker gang. Their rides -- somewhere between trikes and choppers -- are customized beyond all human reckoning or probably driveability and their outfits are a hybrid of Elvis jumpsuits, showgirl headresses, variety show Cher and Diana Ross' drag in Mahaogany.

Eventually they meet up with a bumbling male motorcycle gang, the Batch, gang led by Mellow, who rides a Vespa dressed up as a Pirate of the Carribbean and is played by Roger E. Mosley, better known as T.C. from Magnum P.I. I think one of 'em might be the guy who played Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnatti. After some partying Sweetback-style, she tracks down her brother, who is enacting the "kung fu school in the ghetto"  trope that makes any movie better.

The world of Darktown Strutters is cartoonish in the extreme. There's the over-the-top bikes and costumes of the characters, while the sets are primary-colored and reminiscent of a children's television playhouse. The acting makes the work of William Shatner look sublte and, when that's not enough, scenes are overcranked to silent-movie speed and plenty of boing, zap and ooga ooga. And sometimes there's dance breaks. The whole movie stops so people can dance. And not in a choreographed "this is a musical" way. No, it's a "let's put on a record and dance" way.

Syreena dresses up as a nun, a policewoman, a flapper hooker using her natural poise and take-charge manner to stomp along in her quest to find her mother. It is to Trina Parks' credit that she seems to simultaneously roll with the insanity around her, yet remain slightly above it.

It also helps that the villains are even more ridiculous than the ostensible good guys. The police crash around in cars with sirens that cover the entire hood, put on blackface and drag to chase killers, frequently get stuck in their cop cars, and Syreena easily plays them like Obi Wan plays the Stormtroopers. In Darktown Strutters we have the classic pulp/noir plotline of protagonist returns home, searches for missing family member by asking many questions and visiting many character actors before finally coming to the top of the conspiracy.

After battling the KKK on a merry-go-round, following the Cowboy to the Pot-Sicle Factory and watching the Dramatics sing "What You See Is What You Get" in full spangly jumpsuits and choreography, but behind bars in a papier-mache dungeon we come to our final showdown. It seems that the Colonel Sanders-like head of the Sky Hog rib franchise, has kidnapped Cinderella as part of his plot to kidnap and brainwash Black leaders. (A plot concept also used in Undercover Brother.) At home, he likes to dress up in a pig costume and watch minstrel shows. He also has a giant mechanical womb named Annie that he is trying to use to make clones. Or something. Whatever, womb-controlling racist politically right-wing fast-food guy.

On the blaxploitation scale, Darktown Strutters is definitely in the upper 20% -- people who have a need for logic and a distaste for the infeasible might not think so, but fuck them. Darktown Strutters is certainly worth watching, even more so in these times when the idea of a evil, oppressive fast-food magnate is not so hard to believe....

The Scarlet Empress

Outside, it is as hot as.... well, outside is the desert in August, so you can guess how hot it is. When it's this kind of infernal, one of my favorite ways to imagine myself cool is watching black-and-white movies set in places with abundant snow. Among these are Alexander Nevsky and The Thing, but best of all is The Scarlet Empress. Josef Von Sternberg made seven films with Marlene Dietrich, their pairing was one of the finest examples of folie a deux in the history of film and The Scarlet Empress is Dietrich's iconicism and Von Sternberg's stylization, both cranked up to 11.

The story of Catherine the Great has been told over and over again in film, played by everyone from Jeanne Moreau to Julia Ormond to Jayne Meadows to Bette Davis to Catherine Zeta-Jones to Tallulah Bankhead and even my old boss Viveca Lindfors. Actually in 1934, the year of The Scarlet Empress, The Rise of Catherine the Great also came out, starring Elisabeth Bergner -- ironically, Dietrich had been minor supporting actress to Bergner's leading lady in a production of The Taming of the Shrew back when they were both young actresses in Berlin. But the Von Sternberg/Dietrich version is the one everyone remembers.

We begin with the young German Princess Sophia Frederica, briefly played by Dietrich's cranky-puss daughter, Maria. We then are reminded via intertitle of the barbarism of Russia. This offers an opportunity for Von Sternberg to indulge in some kinky torture scenes, then cutting directly to Shirley Temple -- excuse me, Marlene Dietrich, swinging in a flower-filled garden, a la Fragonard. Dietrich's performance is best described as smirk-inducing. Seeing the world-weary, cosmopolitan, bisexual, chic Marlene Dietrich playing wide-eyed, curly-topped innocent is, well, as ridiculous as it sounds.

The emissary of barbaric Russia arrives in the person of Alexei, Fabio-like hunk John Lodge. Lodge's acting career was very brief -- he only made a few films (and actually turned down a role in Mae West's She Done Him Wrong). He went on to become a congressman and governor of Connecticut, as well as ambassador to Spain. He has been sent to bring the young princess to Russia to marry the Grand Duke. There is much riding through great drifts of snow in piles of fur. Lodge leers at Dietrich, Dietrich continues to maintain the affect of someone with mild brain damage. More snow, more horses, more extras, more furs, more leering, more faux-naif Marlene, more snow, more furs, more horses, more snow. Brrrrrrr!

The set design of The Scarlet Empress is legendary, setting some kind of benchmark for the bizarre and it's when we hit Russia that it goes full-on bonkers. Doors 15 feet high and eight feet across that require a bevy of hoopskirted extras to open and close. Gargoyles looming over the tops of chairs, life-size skeletons serving as candelabrum: This is gothic home decor at it finest!

Princess Dietrich is presented to the Czarina, played by Louise Dresser as an overbearing Midwestern harpy. While taking in the bones of the damned end table and the magazine rack of the black soul, she gets an on-the-spot hymen check (Fun Fact: The bewigged queen crawling up under Dietrich's panniers is Hans von Twardoski, an old friend of hers from Berlin.), her name is changed to Catherine and she's introduced to her new husband -- a simpering, sadistic half-wit. Good times! We then get to the spectacular wedding sequence. Nearly wordless, it is sustained by Dietrich's beauty and Von Sternberg's visual skill. The many non-dialogue sequences and use of multiple and verbose title cards makes one thing Von Sternberg would have preferred The Scarlet Empress to be a silent film.

This motif continues with the post-wedding banquet scene. Surrounded by servants, statues, skeletons, violinists  and multiple forms of roast beast, we see the contrast between the elegant Grand Duchess Catherine and the pig's head-chomping lesser nobles, the contrast between the bug-eyed, drooling Grand Duke and the suave, sexy Alexei. We will be reminded of this over and over.

Dietrich is still keeping up her ditzy sophmore act at 33:26, but at least her costumes begin to improve and are a little less "the village idiot dressed in a bassinet," as her daughter Maria described it -- the black velvet riding habit with metallic trim and white ostrich plumed-tricorn hat is fabulous. Maria wrote a semi-vicious biography of her mother, but even when exposed on the page, Marlene reaches from the grave to still awe and enchant both reader and author. Thus the Mommie Dearest segments don't stick as much as the stories of film shoots, which largely hinged on costume selections. Dietrich worked closely with Travis Banton on the designs.

But, even in a pair of diamond-buckled mules that would make Christian Louboutin weep, Dietrich is still simpering and lisping and playing the fool. "A luvah? [blink blink, purse lips, blink] Why, what may that beeeee? [blink, blink, toss curls] How schocking!" This is possibly the most sophisticated woman who ever lived carrying on like this for forty-five minutes!

Finally, mercifully, after some rolling in the hay (Interrupted by a horse -- ha ha! Don't tell me Von Sternberg didn't intend that.) and some note-passing with Alexei (Love, love, love the fur-trimmed ballgown.), she finally hooks up with a passing guardsman and, lo! an heir to the throne is born. Just in time, since the Czarina of Cleveland is getting old -- "Empress, bah! I haven't the power to iron out a single wrinkle!" -- and infirm. Well, that's what you get from a life of red meat, vodka and screaming at people. (Don't get me wrong: I fully endorse all of those things.)

Dietrich's post-birth scene is another virtuosic Von Sternberg shot, traveling through multiple layers and foci. (Fun Fact: Josef von Sternberg's fondness for shooting through and around veils, lace and gauze migfht be traced back to his youthful day job in a lace store.) And, finally! We have Dietrich. No more curls, no more whispering, no more cluelessness, no more Baby Spice. It's back to the Dietrich voice, the Dietrich wit, the Dietrich appraising gaze. And, oh, what a confection of white plumes and satin she has to do it with. And the wig! She looks like a Macchiavellian survivor version of Marie Antoinette.  (Which, in a way, as another foreign princess sent to rule a hostile new court in late eighteenth-century Europe, Catherine the Great actually kind of was.)

"I have weapons that are far more powerful than any political machine." Spoken with the assurance of a woman who had Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Yul Brynner, Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Erich Maria Remarque, Edith Piaf, Alberto Giacometti, Edward Murrow, John Gilbert, Colette, George S. Patton, Jean Gabin, and both Joe and Jack Kennedy!

Dimwit Grand Duke and his Court Tramp (who does rock a great smoky eye, though) threaten Catherine, but she is unimpressed -- actually, she manages to read them both to filth without saying a word and that, children, is why Marlene Dietrich was and is one of the greatest stars of all time.

Dietrich consolidates her power one man at a time. The Scarlet Empress is where that classic "reviewing the troops"  bit that the great Madeline Kahn did so well was born. More outfits! There's a sheer black peignoir trimmed with black and white feathers that would make Dita Von Teese squeal and clap her hands and which Marlene uses to help consolidate her, erm, military support. She gets the church on her side by slinging a few 36-strand pearl bracelets at them "for the poor." And, as you can imagine, everyone is Russia is swayed by her fabulous fucking style.

Finally, with the backing of the army, church, the people, and fashion bloggers everywhere, Catherine takes over Russia. The film closes with another of Von Sternberg's word-free visual mini-symphonies, Marlene in white military uniform leading the troops up the stairs of the Winter Palace...

I couldn't say whether The Scarlet Empress is my favorite Dietrich/Von Sternberg film. (And if Edie Sedgwick was the muse of my teenage years, Marlene Dietrich remains who i want to be when i grow up.) Shanghai Express has existentialist Dietrich in amazing deco fashions, sharing a cabin on the train of doom with her friend, the icily gorgeous and just as cool Anna May Wong. Or the finally-out-on-DVD Dishonored, in which fatalistic spy Dietrich displays a world-weariness and steely resolve that makes Angelina Jolie look like a simpering bint. But, on an August in the desert day, i'll take The Scarlet Empress.

Summer Under the Stars

Summer before last, I wrote up my own plan for Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars." Each August, they devote an entire day to a particular star. I came up with my own schedule. I also managed to "transition" each day by finding a film both subjects were in. I also devoted Fridays to directors and added some other ideas...

Ciao! Manhattan

Ah, Edie Sedgwick, muse of my teenage years, years of black tights, heavy eyeliner and cigarettes.She was the original It Girl, the Tinkerbell who bestowed sparkle on Andy Warhol's Pittsburg nerd. She came from a wealthy, blue-blood family, who were impressive both for their place in American history and as an example of the evils of the same. Many of her family members went in and out of mental hospitals, several committed suicide (including the beautiful actress cousin that was her prototype and the two beloved brothers who accompanied her to the clinics and preceded her to an early grave). But, for a brief period in the mid-1960s, she ruled New York City from magazine layouts, gossip columns, TV talk shows and underground films. The true star of Warhol's crew of crazies.

Ciao! Manhattan is an essentially flawed film. The first attempt at making it began in New York City in 1966. The shooting was endless, the money got blown of drugs and who knows what, the film was unfinished. In 1970, a crew got together in Malibu to try to complete it with new footage and a new-ish storyline. Then half the cast wandered off (drugs again), shooting stopped again.. or something. Finally, some more new sequences were shot for yet another turn in the storyline and Ciao! Manhattan was shuffled onto screens in 1972 -- by then the leading lady was dead and the whole thing was passe anyway.

So, Edie or "Susan," now far from Diana Vreeland and the Chelsea Hotel, gets picked up by some dumb hick hippie as she is hitchiking. Dumb Hick Hippie ("I drive around. Lookin' at stuff.") takes her home to her mansion, and then Edie's Shelley Winters-like Gorgon of a mother hires him to babysit her (although he'd rather "build me a flyin' saucer"). Smart Hustler Hippie shows him around, Smart Hustler Hippie being too smart for this babysitting shit and too busy stealing the silverware anyway.

Edie lolls around in a tent in an empty swimming pool and contemplates her past in the form of endless flashbacks to the mid-sixties footage. She smokes and stares into space and tries to recall her past in disjointed, demi-coherent monologues. However she rambles, though, Edie is a damn sight better than the dubbed internal chatter of Dumb Hick Hippie ("If I hang around long enough, I might get me some poontang.") or the shitty Z-level folk music that plays when he's not babbling. Seriously, Ciao! Manhattan  may be the penultimate proof that, when it came to sixties counterculture, New York hip beat the crap out of Los Angeles hippie.

Then somehow we get footage of yet another fucking hippie yammering in voiceover to some old man named Mr. Vedecchio or something. And more of the Dumb Hick Hippie, ceaselessly ruminating with his 68 I.Q., and who has got to be one of the most tedious, unappealing creatures ever to appear in a film. Seriously, i want him to fucking die... All one can do is try to drift away into your own thoughts until the film reverts to the pre-1968 footage and crazy gorgeous Edie flying around Manhattan like some kind of chic fairy of depravity.

Waking up in a luxury pad, getting high, getting dressed, cruising down the FDR Drive in her Rolls Royce, frolicking with Alan Ginsburg and the Empire State Building, shooting a fashion spread for
Diana Vreeland, shooting a movie with Andy, going to Dr. Robert's for a poke... (Although actually Edie's feelgood of choice was Dr. Max Jacobson, who also shot up Marlene Dietrich, Truman Capote, Mickey Mantle, and the Kennedys.) There's monologues here too, but somehow the raps flow more smoothly and seem to have an internal logic -- Brigid Berlin is particularly hilarious.

Back in the ostensible present on the West Coast, Edie tries to talk and lapses into disassociation, tries to dance and stumbles into a heap on the floor, flashing her siliconed boobs for the hundredth time. There's horror in the contrast between the bubbling, constantly active, endlessly watchable, alive Edie of the black-and-white footage and the beautiful, brain-dead doll passed out in a backyard in lurid technicolor. Now, after drug addiction and shock treatment, she's a zombie that makes Norma Desmond look as alert as an Olympic sprinter at the starting block and as with-the-times as Twitter.

Ciao! Manhattan isn't a particularly good film. For Edie Sedgwick or Warhol fans it's worth a look at all of the New York City glamour footage and the newer DVDs have plenty of bonus clips from the better milieu, as well as interviews with director David Weisman and biographer George Plimpton, as well old factory cronies, designer Betsey Johnson and Factory scenester Bibbe Hansen -- who also happens to be Beck's mom. Yeah: She was also in Prison with Edie, Andy Warhol's "girls in lockdown" movie, which, i'm sure, is much better than Ciao! Manhattan.

Alas, few of the prime Warhol-era movies are readily available -- and by prime, I mean the mid-late sixties Warhol era -- drag queens, Chelsea Girls, Velvet Underground, 47th Street Factory, pre-Solanas shooting Warhol. If you ever get the chance, see Beauty #2, Lupe,  or, especially, Vinyl -- one of my favorite movies, a strangely hypnotic improvised study on S&M and post-Greenwich Village/pre-Haight-Ashbury cool; Edie has not a single line but comes out the undisputed star of the film. Again, better than Ciao! Manhattan.