From ‘Flesh’ to ‘Frankenstein’

The Los Angeles Museum of Art’s “Out of the Factory: The Films of Paul Morrissey” continues Friday at 7:30 p.m. with “Flesh” (1968) and “Heat” (1972).

“Flesh” is the first Andy Warhol Factory film formally attributed to Paul Morrissey--to anyone, for that matter. For all the similarities between this and Warhol’s films--the casual, uninhibited sex and language, the strobe cuts and familiar passive hero on an erotic odyssey--there are revealing differences. First, “Flesh” is most definitely Morrissey’s and not Warhol’s film, and it is a surprisingly poignant film at that.

“Flesh” follows two days in the seamy existence of a New York hustler (Joe Dallesandro), whom Morrissey views with more compassion than the resolutely detached Warhol might have. Indeed, this picture possesses a quality of tenderness rarely if ever present in a Warhol film--for example, a scene with Dallesandro feeding his child is extraordinarily touching.

Often outrageous, sometimes funny and always with a profound sadness lurking just beneath the nonchalant surface, “Flesh” begins put-on style with a travesty of marriage when Dallesandro’s wife (Geraldine Smith) asks him to go and hustle the cash her girlfriend needs for an abortion. This leads Dallesandro’s hustler to a series of encounters--with a young homosexual; with a British painter (Maurice Bradell) who merely wants Dallesandro to pose in the nude and bores him with a rather delightful lecture on classic art and the beauty of the human body; with a couple of neophyte hustlers; and with a topless dancer with whom he has sex while a pair of transvestites pore over an old movie magazine.

At the end, he returns home to find his wife more interested in her pregnant girlfriend than in him. The point of all this, not surprisingly, is that everybody regards Dallesandro’s hunky street urchin with a Dead End Kid accent as an object rather than a person. But Dallesandro, like Anna Karina in “My Life to Live,” thinks he can sell his body and keep his soul.

“Heat” finds Morrissey breaking new ground and is a captivating but too drawn-out parody of “Sunset Boulevard” crossed with “Where Love Has Gone.” Based on an idea by writer John Hallowell (who appears briefly as a columnist), “Heat” features Sylvia Miles as a fading Hollywood star reduced to guest spots on TV game shows and Dallesandro as a onetime TV series cowboy trying to make a comeback as a rock singer. Miles and Dallesandro, whose character is an uninhibited sexual opportunist, meet through her daughter (Andrea Feldman), a mixed-up girl who eventually vies with her mother for Dallesandro’s charms.

Now there’s a great deal of honesty and perception--and inherent absurd humor--in Morrissey’s development of this combustible triangle. Miles dominates with her deadly accurate portrayal of a sweet-tough woman who is as honest as she is selfish. Indeed, “Heat” rings true at its core; it’s around the edges that it indulges in a tad too much spoofery and sexploitation.

With “Heat,” Morrissey moves beyond camp pathos and the put-on and into the fiction film--but only halfway. At times he juxtaposes techniques of improvisation and traditional filmmaking to create a harshly documentary realism, allowing him to walk a remarkably thin line between comedy and tragedy. In these moments, “Heat” becomes a quite authentic evocation of Hollywood’s sleazy underside--only to retreat to the triviality of the spoof. By the same token, Morrissey for the first time asks us to take his people seriously--only to throw in a lot of sex that previously might have looked casual but here seems too often gratuitous. In short, “Heat” finds Morrissey caught midstream between two styles--but he would make it to the other side in future work.

Saturday brings Morrissey’s darkly lurid “Flesh for Frankenstein” (1974), a grisly camp travesty of the venerable horror tale--in 3-D!--that screens twice, at 7:30 p.m. and again at 10--although this is a midnight movie if there ever was one. There’s lots of gore, and some nudity as well. Suave, insinuating Udo Kier (who will appear in person at both screenings) is ideal casting as Dr. Frankenstein, who intends to lop off the head of Dallesandro’s lusty peasant as part of his determination to create out of parts from various bodies “the perfect specimen of Serbian youth.” (You would have thought that Dallesandro in his entirety would have sufficed.) Morrissey manages to work in the notion that the true villain of the plot is, of all things, “unbridled sexuality.” With Monique Van Vooren. Be warned: “Flesh for Frankenstein”is not for the squeamish. (323) 857-6010.

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Among the films screening this weekend at Melnitz Hall in the UCLA Film Archive’s “Cinema Novo and Beyond” series is “Central Station” director Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ “Foreign Land” (Sunday at 7 p.m.), a strong, bold film that sets the tone for this exceptional series. It is set in 1990, when Fernando Collor de Mello, the first elected president of Brazil in nearly three decades, declares a confiscation of all savings accounts of the entire population, which had the effect of driving about 800,000 people out of the country. Among them is Alex (Fernanda Torres, daughter of “Central Station” star Fernanda Montenegro), a tempestuous woman of 28 working as a waitress in Lisbon, where she’s consumed with homesickness and despair. The filmmakers cut back and forth between Alex and Paco (Fernando Alves Pinto), a handsome 21-year-old in Sao Paulo who will eventually become involved with Alex in a high-risk diamond smuggling operation. Shot in black and white, “Foreign Land” exudes youthful drive and outrage and is as romantic as it is critical. (310) 206-FILM.

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The third and so far most engaging of the films in the Grande Four-Plex’s “Aussie Adventures” series is Chris Kennedy’s “Doing Time for Patsy Cline,” which opens a one-week run Friday. The film benefits from a strong trio of star performances, but its overall impact is diminished by its awkward structure. Matt Day plays a naive Outback wannabe country and western singer who’s off to Nashville when he hitches a ride to Sydney with a gorgeous young singer (Miranda Otto) and her drug-dealing boyfriend (Richard Roxborough) only to wind up in jail. Apparently sensing that this romantic adventure grinds to a halt while the guys are stuck behind bars, Kennedy inserts a flurry of fast-forwards as a way of maintaining momentum only to inescapably telegraph too much of the plot. The film has a winning quality, lots of grit and charm and enjoyable music, but remains a minor item. (213) 617-0268.