Straight Shooters

By JAY COCKS

Dusty and Sweets pass a good part of the weekend in the Studio City Motel shooting dope. At one point, lying on the grass in one of those vacant Los Angeles parks, Dusty says that if they just had ten pounds of dope their problems would be solved. "Sure," says Sweets. "We could sleep forever." Larry and Pam, still not past high school, live together. They spend most of their time getting loaded. Larry scores off Dusty. He helps Pam shoot under the tongue for the first time.

Kit Ryder calls himself "a 20th century faggot" and cruises the Strip, hustling for bread. Nancy Wheeler sits on a mattress and talks about the time she was shooting so heavily that two friends got off on her leavings. City Life keeps himself moving by pushing stuff he gets from a big-time dealer in a silver Mercedes. He is also an informer.

Frenetic Feel. A dope fiend named Tip knocks over the dealer in the Mercedes. Dusty and Sweets get busted because of information provided by City Life. Larry dies of an overdose. The Solid Gold Weekend, three days of rock radio that has underscored the action, is nearly over.

That's roughly the jagged, frenetic feel of Dusty and Sweets McGee, a kaleidoscopic semidocumentary about the L.A. subculture. Writer-Director Floyd Mutrux has made a good small film about a large and imposing subject. Dusty and Sweets McGee is not even so much a movie about dope as it is about a lifestyle; it is a lamentation for part of a generation crazily enamored of slow narcotic suicide.

Mutrux and Cinematographer William Fraker capture the feeling: the neon and chromium, the chili-dog stands, the freeways, the drive-in stereo stores and the supermarkets. Nearly all of the characters are played by junkies, not actors. They relive their lives for a camera that observes compassionately as each fix brings them that much closer to self-destruction. Mutrux views his characters as victims, if rather romantic ones. That attitude lends his film a distinct but unsatisfactory ambiguity.

This movie shares one problem with another new film about dope called The Panic in Needle Park. Both Mutrux and Jerry Schatzberg, who directed Needle Park, are too much absorbed by the mechanics of addiction. They include lengthy and excessive footage of dope, needles, veins and various techniques of shooting. Mutrux and Schatzberg understand well enough the conditions of hard doping, but they do not adequately suggest the causes.

Needle Park is a more conventional work, concentrating on a love affair between a pusher named Bobby (Al Pacino) and a girl called Helen (Kitty Winn), who has come to New York from Indiana, had a bad love affair and a painful abortion. She picks up a habit from Bobby and becomes a prostitute to raise dope money for both of them. They hole up with other junkies in the threadbare hotel rooms around

Manhattan's "Needle Park"--junkie vernacular for the area around Broadway and 72nd Street. Finally, Helen is reduced to turning Bobby over to the cops. But when he is sprung from jail, she is there waiting for him.

The film is based on a LIFE series by James Mills. Its fictional framework does not mesh well with its documentary approach. The screenplay, by Novelist Joan Didion and her husband, Journalist John Gregory Dunne, is disappointing; it never explains enough about the main characters. When a resolutely middle-class girl from Indiana winds up in New York turning tricks for smack, there should be more behind it than the mere suggestion of a repressive family situation. Of Bobby we know still less.

Schatzberg is an adequate if academic craftsman, but he has spent so much time fussing over the proper visual atmosphere that Needle Park comes out looking more deliberately grubby than spontaneously realistic. Plainly, however, he took a good deal of trouble with his performers. Al Pacino, a New York stage actor making his movie debut, is good, although he has yet to scale down his stage mannerisms to the closer dimensions of films. Kitty Winn performs with meticulous naturalism, and there is a gallery of strong secondary performances, including a nice cameo by Alan Vint as a tough, low-key narc. But even such sensitive, finely observed acting cannot provide the depth of insight or sympathy that The Panic in Needle Park so badly needs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.