Knowing Andy Milligan's reputation, and judging from the video box cover, I really wasn't expecting much from this film. To tell the truth, I wasn't expecting ANYTHING from it. I rented it because I had never seen a Milligan movie and wanted to see if he was as lousy a filmmaker as his reputation says he is. Well, judging by this film, he isn't.
That's not to say that it's any kind of masterpiece, or even particularly good, or even particularly competent. Although the IMDb technical specs for this film say it was shot in 35mm, it has the grainy, poor color quality and lousy sound of 16mm, which is what it really appears to be. The acting is nothing special but not completely incompetent. Neil Flannagan as a drag queen hooker is sort of charming in a pathetic way, and has a scene where he gets into an argument in a bar that is actually pretty funny. Diana Lewis as the young girl who's the centerpiece of this isn't particularly impressive, but she gets by. Harry Reems tries too hard to be the boy next door type and doesn't really pull it off, but he's at least watchable. Amazingly for a Milligan film there's actually a coherent story line about the kinds of people who inhabited the seamy area of Manhattan known as Times Square way back before Disney bought it up and sterilized it, and Milligan actually does a pretty good job of conveying the seediness, depravity, debauchery and general scuzziness that typified the area at that time. What really sets this movie apart from others of its type that I've seen, however, is the way it treats its characters. It's not judgmental of them at all, and doesn't romanticize them as poor pathetic victims or portray them as vicious, depraved victimizers. It just shows them as people who don't have a whole lot going for them and try to get by as best they can with what they've got, doing whatever it is they have to do to make it through to the next day. In other words, they're not much different from anyone else. It took me a while to realize what he was saying with this movie because of the film's technical and narrative shortcomings--for all the good intentions he seems to have brought to this project, Milligan is still a terrible director--but the area and the subject matter were apparently close to his heart, and if Andy Milligan can be said to have made a "personal" film, this is probably it. It's worth a look to see what Times Square was really like back in the early '70s, and the film itself is actually, on the whole, pretty interesting. Check it out.
