Ciao Manhattan

Ciao! Manhattan is an underground film starring former Warhol Superstar Edie Sedgwick. Edie was one of those troubled rich girls who died young because they only found solace in drugs and booze. Certainly an interesting individual. Of course, for me it is difficult to respect any "socialite" since the ones we've had the last two decades have given these people a bad name.

Ciao! Manhattan is a combination of two films: a black-and-white production made shortly after Sedgwick's exit from the Warhol Superstars from 1966-67 and color footage from 1970-71. Sedgwick plays herself, albeit with the name of Susan Superstar as she lives in a tent in the pool of her Mom's mansion, boozing and drugging herself to death while some drifter from Texas named Butch half-listens and half-dreams while she talks about her sordid life in New York.

I found the film to be 90 minutes of druggy dialogue. Ms. Sedgwick was clearly drugged up during the color segments. You needed subtitles to understand what she and Butch were saying. I also saw it as an overlong YouTube video where somebody is pleading for help. She's asking in vain for somebody to help her and the clowns who are supposed to listen to her cries for help are too busy screwing around.

Sadly for Edie, her entire 28 years were a total mess. I doubt even today you could save her. She was the Amy Winehouse of her day.

These people associated with Andy Warhol were quite an eclectic group and it is certainly worth watching any material you can find of them to see what the excesses of the 1960's did to them. I still wonder what happened to those drug addicts in the Roliing Stones' CS Blues but we already know what happened to Ms. Sedgwick.

Reportedly created from the salvaging of two unfinished film products, this portrait of model Edie Segwick is half documentary, half loosely inspired fiction. The two forms cut back and forth from each other, but are bound together by their commitment to Andy Warhol inspired cinema dada-ism. The documentary features some straighforward coverage on Segwick, and some fragmented pieces of movie performance art. The fictional part, in which Segwick plays a character inspired by herself, tells the story of a highway drifter who picks up the (half naked) hitchhiking Segwick and takes her home, where she lies topless in the deep end of an empty swimming pool and incoherently babbles about god knows what for the rest of the movie. It's amazing what passed for art back in the sixties, and this film is a prime example that will either leave you moved and inspired or (more likely) laughing your head off.

Ciao! Manhattan is an avant-garde film that makes the films of Jean-Luc Godard seem conventional. That's not to attack Godard, mind you. I'm just comparing the two to express how far out Ciao! Manhattan is. The slight narrative concerns a young Texan hippie traveling the American countryside just because he likes to see things. One night, he sees something quite unexpected: a beautiful young woman with bare breasts hitchhiking. He picks her up (who wouldn't?) and finds that she has a couple of dog tags around her neck with her name, Susan, and address on them. He takes her home. Susan's mother thanks him and offers him a job taking care of her daughter. Susan was a young model in New York, a discovery of artist Andy Warhol. She lived a life of hard partying, and is now paying for it with a severe case of brain damage. Now Susan lives in a drained pool in her mother's back yard, and she spends endless hours drinking hard liquor and rattling off stories about the old days in New York.

At first, Ciao! Manhattan just seemed to me an excessively playful experimental film with a bunch of bizarre imagery and editing and stuff. I was laughing, it was fun to see the excesses of that sub-culture which I know so little about. But after a while, the film just started working, and really well. Susan is played by Edie Sedgwick, who really was a protege model of Andy Warhol. The film works a fine balance between reality and fiction. How much of Sedgwick are we seeing? Is any of it fictional. She died three months before the film was released, and, edited into the last moments of the film, there is a shot of a newspaper headline that announces the death. Whether Ciao! Manhattan was meant to be or not, it serves as a dirge, not only to Edie Sedgwick, but to the young generation of the time.

I don't know, maybe I loved this film because I grew to adulthood so far after the hippie generation, but I'll tell you one thing: I have seen a ton of the greatest films ever made. It's a rare experience to come upon one that is as unique as this one. Perhaps there were a thousand films like this at the time, but none are available except this. Well, I choose to praise this. 10/10.

The thing I really love about the D.V.D. revolution of the last few years is that some of the strangest and most obscure movies are now readily available. No longer do you have to spend hours searching through the racks in out of the way video stores or resort to fourth generation bootleg copies. 'Ciao Manhattan' is a case in point. I'd been curious about this movie ever since reading Jean Stein's brilliant Edie Sedgwick bio 'Edie' back in the 1980s, and now here it is! The 30th Anniversary edition, with excellent picture commentary and deleted footage. The only people who seem more excited about seeing it again than me are the directors (John Palmer and David Weisman) themselves going by the chatty and informative commentary track they have made with 'Ciao Manhattan' co-star Wesley Hayes. For those who don't know Edie was "The Face of 1965", a beautiful socialite turned model and Warhol "superstar". At one point in the 1960s quite possible the coolest girl in the world. Very shortly thereafter she was almost forgotten, and died aged 28 after a drug overdose. 'Ciao Manhattan' is made up of black and white footage shot in 1967 originally intended for a never finished movie that almost accidentally starred Edie, and later colour footage filmed in an attempt to salvage the project. In the final version Edie plays a character called Susan, a former model and underground film star who has retreated to her mother's home for "treatment". She's a mess - has permanent brain damage and a drinking problem. Hayes plays Butch a young Texan drifter who picks Susan up while she is hitchhiking half naked down the highway. He returns her home and Susan's mother (Isabel Jewell) hires him to babysit her troubled daughter. The movie cuts between "now" and then, colour and black and white, documentary footage and paranoid sci fi fantasy. It's quite a trip! Anybody interested in Andy Warhol or The Velvet Underground will want to see this very strange, but watchable mess. Neither Warhol or The Velvets actually appear mind you, but Warhol scenesters like Paul America, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin (Brigid Polk) and Viva do, as do Beat legend Allen Ginsberg (as himself, mostly naked) and 'Barbarella' director Roger Vadim (clothed, as Susan's doctor). If you watch the outtakes you also get to see Robert and Nena Thurman. Yes, Uma's folks. 'Ciao Manhattan' may not thrill everyone but for me it's essential viewing for anyone interested in 1960s pop culture, especially Warhol's Factory, which subsequently influenced almost every underground pop movement thereafter from punk on down.

As Edie's biography here on IMDb says, she was in and out of institutions. It is clear that this woman-child was taken advantage of very callously by Andy Warhol and others, at first for her money, and later for her celebrity.

Ciao! Manhattan shocked and angered me when I first saw it in 1972, because I had known Edie. For several months in 1962, when she was in a very tony, low-security psychiatric institution in Westchester, I knew her as a sweet-natured, somewhat reticent, and very artistic 19-year-old. When I first met her I thought she was a 12-year-old child, as I was, for she was so thin and under-developed looking for her age. Seeing the way she is abused in Ciao! Manhattan just leaves me feeling very sad for her. She deserved better than this exploitation film.

As for the "Summer of Love" reference made by an earlier reviewer on IMDb, referring to the fact that this film was actually made partly in 1967, I do not think Ciao, Manhattan represents any of the genuine feelings of free expression and loving attitudes that were touted at the time. There is far too much cynicism inherent in this film to connect it in any way to the hippie happiness one could experience in pleasanter circles than that inhabited/created by the ghastly, selfish, mean-spirited, and self-involved Warhol. He used and threw away such gentle souls as Edie. I weep for the lost and under-appreciated life she led while under the influence of Warhol. In kinder company, she might have survived and been happier.

Ciao, Edie! You deserved better.