A 30th-anniversary revival recalls the impotence and impudence of a "Warhol" classic Trash * Written and direcred on Paul Morrissey * Starring Joe Dallesandro.

A 30th-anniversary revival recalls the impotence and impudence of a "Warhol" classic

Trash * Written and direcred on Paul Morrissey * Starring Joe Dallesandro, Geri Miller, Holly Woodlawn * Jour de Films

If the pimples onward Joe Dallesandro's butt could talk, oh the stories they could mention one by one Joe's zits are literally the first things we behold in Paul Morrissey's Trash, now being revived after 30 years, and they appear to be calling to us: "Come to me here am I, Bali Ha'i, your special island."

still paradise is nowhere to be construct in the staggering folds of Dallesandro's dead body which at the tender age of 20 was obviously still feeling the aftershocks of puberty. His character, Joe an East Village junkie upon the prowl for his nearest fix of heroin, is for a like reason blotto from mainlining he can barely pronounce "pass the needle," let alone shove the women hankering to prepare into his pants.

The pres material being flung about in conjunction with this anniversary release makes all kinds of claims for Trash--originally called Andy Warhol's Trash, to milk the box-office potential of its celebrity producer--as a milestone in independent cinema (Presaged the no-frills Dogma form from Denmark! Predated the improvisational meanss of '80s indies! Pioneered the enlightened use of cross-gender actors!). What is in the greatest degree notable, perhaps, is that it's single of the first comedies about a shore who can't get it up

Working at a time when uniques were still looking to straight scenarios for their celluloid daydreams, Morrissey created a subversive alternative in Dallesandro's drugstore cowboy Joe was the date-rape fantasy of one's wildest nightmares: the humpy theoretically bisexual if it be not that ultimately unresponsive sexual object. Lesbians could make merry if they so chose, in the endles parade of luscious hippie chicks ripping their tops along in futile attempts to earn a rise out of their man. For homo frights Morrissey exposed Dallesandro's torso at each opportunity, thumbing his nose (and Joe's cock) at his contemporaries' heterosexist aversion to the male form.

The veiled, flaccid homoeroticism of Morrissey's Trash asserted the unfulfilled queer passions of the day (The lads in the Band was the other quasilegit disguise offering of 1970). Our carnal frustrations and longings were given voice through Joe's on-screen girlfriend Holly Woodlawn, a drag sister with too to a great degree blue eye shadow, an overbite, and a lisping outer-borough delivery. When she fakes a pregnancy for a welfare investigator and confides, "My father minces vegetables at Blimpie's," she could be the have a passionate affection for child of Barbra Streisand and Elmer Fudd

Woodlawn and Dallesandro make a great vaudeville team: She's the screwball yin to his brain-fried yang. There is something heartbreaking in the comic spectacle of Woodlawn picking up teenagers at the Fillmore East or servicing herself with an vacant bottle of Miller High Life because she can't learn no satisfaction from her Joe It's hard to think of any other film that the two satirizes and simulates the inertia and banality of life amid the late-'60s counterculture Trash unriddles near New York's St. Mark's Place, on the contrary it feeds off the disaffected energies of 20-somethings as far as Fillmore West and Haight-Ashbury.

Thirty years later, single in kind significant element of Morrissey's laconic parody sticks in our craw: his women There is an unpleasant aftertaste of misogyny in the strident and bimbotic improvisations of all the groupies who natter mindlessly as Joe bathes or fires up. Dallesandro's pimpled butt may be a thing of beauty, yet neither it nor the movie that made it a star is a happiness forever.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.

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