Dusty and Sweets McGee

It's a documentary about dope addicts. shot in pleasant, clean settings and mostly middle close-ups. Occasionally, when showing the addicts injecting, it's extreme close-ups of the needle going into flesh, and sometimes, while they are high tight two-shots. Otherwise, it's everyone talking in vague terms, referring to the downside of their addiction querulously.

I found it dull. The people are not interesting, their opinions are poorly expressed, and the downside of the addiction is never really shown. It's more an inconvenience than anything else, like having to shop for toilet ppaer. Was there a sense that this sort of life was glamorous and this was intended as a corrective?

Dusty and Sweets McGee is a plotless, episodic look at the days and nights of Los Angeles junkies circa 1971. This mournful, elegiac film is a truly unique entry in its genre, its cast of real life hopheads lending it a bittersweet tinge offset by a marvelous soundtrack of jaunty oldies. Blue Moon, Duke of Earl, The Loco-Motion...these were the songs these young people grew up listening to in happier, simpler times, and now they're the soundtrack of their rapidly disintegrating lives. There's even a perfectly selected Van Morrison tune, Into the Mystic, and a magnificent composition by the unfairly neglected Jake Holmes. The first and best film of director Floyd Mutrux's on again off again Hollywood career, Dusty and Sweets McGee is an amazing time capsule that all serious film fans should try to see.

Clifton, Nancy, and other miscellaneous characters, all born in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, relate their experiences growing up and using drugs and alcohol. some are straight, some are gay. from what i have read, some people actually were drug users, and some are just acting. the trivia section describes a lawsuit, trying to clarify who was what. we listen to people ramble on, with some everyday-life discussion, and lots of talk about sex and drug use. one issue is that much of the lighting is so dark, we can't see what's going on, or who's talking. annoying. it's very disjointed. just cuts to different scenes of different people talking. interesting that Ricky Nelson is listed as music director, but none of the songs are actually performed by him. pretty bleak, listening to all this. gotta think of it in context... this was 1971, just after woodstock, and the flower power age. Best part of this film is the music! Written and directed by Floyd Mutrux. I LOVED his other project Freebie and the Bean, with Alan Arkin, James Caan. more of an actual scripted story, it's SO much better. Mutrux seems to really capture the gritty city life. Find Freebie and the Bean.

Floyd Mutrux's first film as director is the kind of project that a major studio could have produced/"released" only in the 1970s. I put quotation marks around "released" because the film essentially disappeared after opening on the coasts in the summer of 1971. (The summer when American box offices were owned by "Summer of '42.") Besides the unvarnished rawness of its semi-doc approach--which foreshadowed the 21st century reality TV mania--it's an extraordinary piece of Filmmaking (yes, with a capital "F"). Think of it as a heroin-laced valentine to the dying, post-Manson embers of 1960's L.A. hippie counterculture. When I finally got to see the movie a decade or so ago, I was struck by how much George Lucas borrowed from it visually and aurally (the nighttime, neon-bathed shots of cruising cars w/ a golden oldies soundtrack) in "American Graffiti." I actually wondered if Lucas himself was responsible for the film's invisibility for decades: perhaps he didn't want anyone to know just how beholden he was to Mutrux's movie. Of course, Mutrux (kinda/sorta) got the last laugh by hiring "Graffiti" star Paul Le Mat in "Aloha, Bobby and Rose" and making his very own (sorta/kinda) "Graffiti" with 1980's "The Hollywood Knights." The fact that Mutrux never truly got his due (or had the directing career he deserved) remains one of the great tragedies of the New Hollywood era. Speaking of which, when is Mutrux's masterpiece (1978's "American Hot Wax") ever going to be properly released on DVD and/or Blu-Ray? It's quite simply the greatest rock-and-roll movie ever made!

Not my cup of tea. If you are interested in watching some spaced out hippies in 1971 shoot up heroin and talk about their mistakes and what could have been while the camera pans in close and then out again then maybe this film can help you fall asleep.

It certainly has no storyline. Just hippies doing drugs and talking nonsense.

I give it a 2 out of 10 IMDB rating.