Trash [DVD] [1970] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

ANDY WARHOL'S TRASH By C.C.Berg
I first saw this tragic comedy when it was released in Stockholm in 1970, and it is against the background of this period that it should be considered: free love and the birth pill; the hippie flower-power philosophy; the Vietnam war; the drug culture. Twenty-nine years ago this movie had a strange effect on me, I left the cinema with a profound feeling of joy
According to what I have read, the movie is unscripted and the acting improvised, this comes across very clearly. The sound quality is sometimes poor. We are shown a series of 'tableaux', in which some very perturbed, gruesome characters play out their daily life centred on drugs, sex and misery.
Joe, an impotent heroine addict, is constantly looking for his next hit and constantly coming across women who want to make love with him. Joe and his 'wife', sweet Holly Woodlawn, a frightful transvestite (and powerful actress), live in a run-down apartment furnished with what Holly finds in the garbage.
These two characters and the fauna who surround them get into the most absurd and unlikely situations. The movie is sprinkled throughout with humour and grim reality, a dichotomy which works disturbs and delights. One finds oneself passing from disgust to a belly laugh in a matter of seconds and this is where the strength of the movie lies.
To be brief, here is a little gem which is well worth seeing, an absurd drug-sex comedy with much artistic talent. For adults only.

Paul Morrissey's film "Trash", a fascinating glimpse into film history,is probably the first extremely popular underground film( following on the heels of "The Chelsea Girls" and "Flesh").It is a sprawling gem of filth and squalor, a clean break from the predominantly boring Hollywood movies of the time. Filmed with a handheld camera and including long takes of actors spouting bizarre dialogue. Warhol Superstars Joe Dallesandro and Holly Woodlawn are baptized by fire in this oddity, a must for anyone interested in cinema verite and the New York underground movement.

When I saw this movie back in the l970s, I was knocked out of my BVD's with Joe the Magnificent. I had never seen a creature like him before: gorgeous, tough, sweet, funny and sex personified. I've read where this movie was NOT improvised, that Paul Morrisey adhered to a professional script and was a strict, but creative director. Then, I've heard it was just the opposite. I really don't think Joe was faking his drug induced stupor, expressions, mumblings. I loved Holly Woodlawn but nearly upchucked when her hideous, pregnant sister entered the picture. Gross is too mild a word. That drooling wet mouth and buck teeth, her bloated figure, yuck! I wish that sad little lost child, Andrea Feldman, had a bigger part. Thankfully, she was showcased in Andy Warhol's HEAT, another favorite. Once I was in the Village during that time and my boyfriend told me Joe Dellasandro was walking just ahead. I fled--not wanting to see a real embodiment of a movie icon. The same thing happened when Liz Taylor left the theater each night during her starring role in "The Little Foxes" during the 80s. Each night I would study the gigantic crowds, waiting to glimpse her. But when I'd see the stage door open and she began to make her exit, I fled. Reality's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. Gotta run and watch Joe, my Joe, my wonderful Joe in "Trash." A real underground classic.

A military brat who ran wild, Joe Dallesandro did a number of nude modeling jobs for "physique" magazines before he stumbled into Warhol in 1967. Warhol might have been problematic as an artist, but he did have a talent for surrounding himself with the extreme personalities from which he fed. He knew a good thing when he saw it, and for the next several years Dallesandro was a fixture at Warhol's "factory" and made one Warhol-produced, Morrissey-directed film after another. But there is really only one reason to watch any of them, and that is hope that Dallesandro will get naked. And very often he does.

The simple truth is that Morrissey, who typically wrote, edited, and directed these films, is extremely bad at all three. There's not much in the way of plot or script, and it seems Morrissey worked by creating a written outline of the scene and then letting his actors riff on it in bad improvisation for the actual filming. As for acting, you can pretty much forget about it, for none of the performers are actors in any real sense: they are who they are, which to say they are entirely without talent but they are vaguely interesting because they themselves are so extreme. That really is what Joe Dallesandro and Holly Woodlawn and the rest were like.

Like most Warhol-Morrissey-Dallesandro outings the plot is so slight that it is virtually non-existent. Dallesandro is a heroin junkie who has shot up so many times he has become impotent--and this proves to be a tremendous source of frustration to virtually everyone who comes his way, including Holly Woodlawn, a trash-picker/hoarder with whom he lives; Geri Miller, a go-go dancer; rich girl Andrea Feldman; the upscale couple Bruce Pecheur and Jane Forth; and pregnant Diane Podel. The entire film revolves around Dallesandro's efforts to score heroin, and one and all seem horrified by his use of the drug. This may not be acting: Dallesandro does indeed shoot up in his scenes. We can't know what was in the needle, but the way Dallesandro goes about it indicates that he wasn't exactly innocent where the process was concerned, and he does indeed seem stoned in the aftermath.

Dallesandro couldn't act worth a damn and he relies on his chief asset to get him through: he spends a lot of his on-screen time completely naked in all his rough-trade glory. Geri Miller is entertainingly giggly, jiggly, and attractively naked as the go-go girl, and Jane Forth walks off with best scene and lines in the film. But where acting was concerned the big noise was Holly Woodlawn, whose freakish performance was so admired that everyone from George Cukor to Joanne Woodward lobbied for an Oscar nomination. Woodlawn didn't get one, perhaps because the Academy thought the movie too trashy, perhaps because the Academy didn't know if Woodlawn, a transexual, should be nominated as Best Supporting Actor or Best Supporting Actress. My opinion: nobody lobbied for Woodlawn to be nominated and it was all a bad taste hoax joke at Woodlawn's expense. Still, Woodlawn is the lynchpin of the whole thing and possesses tremendous energy, so she gets an A for effort.

When all is said and done, TRASH is actually a cut above most of the Warhol-Morrissey-Dallesandro films, partly because it gives us plenty of Dallesandro nudity, partly because it is freakish in a way that still holds up today, and partly because--largely due to Woodlawn, Miller, and Forth--it has a darkly comic edge. Still, most fans will hit the fast-forward more than once, and non-fans will consider the whole thing unbearably bad.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

This film deals with drugs, very precisely heroin. We are in the post hippy period when drugs became an addiction after having been a life style. The drug addict is reduced in his sexuality, in his thinking and in his social life. He only survives in a hostile environment. But that was in 1970. The environment of the drug addict is either looking for easy kicks by flirting with drugs (high-school students for example), or for sexual kicks among young middle class couples or people who try to use the uninhibited life of the drug addict to have physical contacts with them or to beef up their own boring and fading relations, or for some advantage they can get from them in exchange of some welfare money (social workers for example). This leads to the sad conclusion that drug addicts who look for a certain liberation in a trip beyond limits find themselves entirely trapped in a fake world where alienation is demultiplied by their addiction. The film is of course also a piece of art by the fact that it refuses any kind of special effects or heavy production and the pictures only speak because they are plain, simple, and yet tremendously worked on by the simple technique of the camera, physical acting and voices. The expressivity of the film comes from those simple elements and the realistic revealing dialogue that goes along with it. The feeling we get is that of a totally poignant fatality that pens up the drug addict in a fully lost battle for survival. There seems to be only death at the end of the road.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU