Educational Media Reviews Online

Just as the original 1959 theatrical version of The Connection helped redefine the actor/audience boundaries in experimental theatre in 1959, the 1961 film version scripted by Jack Gelber, and based on his original play, helped propel the independent film movement spearheaded by filmmakers such as Shirley Clarke and John Cassevetes. In the play, boundaries between "theater" and real life became blurred as actors portraying the "playwright" and "producer" addressed the audience directly, telling them that they had assembled a cast of real heroin addicts who would be improvising around a loose scenario. During intermission the “junkies” panhandled the audience and in the second act, a planted actor addressed the stage from his audience seat. This uncredited actor was apparently Martin Sheen. The play was performed at the Living Theatre and was directed by its co-founder Judith Malina. In Shirley Clarke’s film, the “filmmaker” and “cameraman” explain a similar situation about loose outlines and improvisation from heroin addicted musicians and individuals crossing their paths in a loft. The new characters in Clarke’s film are the filmmaker Jim Dunn played by William Redfield and the cameraman J.J. Burden played by Roscoe Lee Brown although only his voice is heard throughout the film. His statement at the beginning of the film explains that the footage was all shot essentially on one evening and that he was left with the task of doing something with it. For audiences seeing this film in the early 1960s, it would have been easy to believe that the film was indeed a documentary as its documentary-like style with swish pan camera would indicate. Today, it is clear that it is a fake documentary about the making of a film. Much of the original cast from the play had reprised their roles when the film version of The Connection opened in New York in October 1962 having failed to receive a New York State license a year earlier but having premiered in Cannes in 1961, where Variety reviewed it as a “tour de force”.

The same May 9, 1961 Variety review mentions that the production cost was $170,000 and Clarke used a bare-bones all-union crew, but more significantly that her film was the most technically perfect of the small group of independent features released up until that point. The professionalism is evident in the look of the film, from grunge on windows to perfectly wrangled cockroaches. Richard Sylbert, the production designer, went on to win two academy awards. The art director Albert Brenner, who was himself subsequently nominated for 5 academy awards, recounts his memory of the shoot in a Bonus Features interview with the film’s restoration supervisor, Ross Lipman from the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Prompted by Lipman, he remembers that although the crew harbored sexist attitudes toward Clarke during the shooting of the film because they couldn’t understand her perfectionism, they were very polite and agreeable in their demeanor as they executed her directives. Due to censorship issues related to a brief shot of a nudie magazine and to the proper colloquial use of “shit” in reference to heroin, the film had limited exhibition yet retained a canonical stature because of the importance in presenting drug addicts as unpunished subjects of a film and incorporating key jazz musicians from the period and allowing them to play. The film is scored by Freddie Redd and includes Jackie McLean on sax. The Connection is highly influential as a jazz film, as a filmic transposition of experimental theater, and as an early key example of American independent filmmaking. Milestone Films has made a commitment to restoring and making available Clarke’s work, and this film is the first of several restorations. This film is very highly recommended for collections involving film, jazz and experimental theater.