Dusty and Sweets McGee

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.

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.

A young couple falls into heroin addiction in Hollywood. Various characters deal with this drug underworld. This starts with interviews with addicts and they look real. This has a pseudo-realism feel. I wouldn't be surprised if anybody is a real addict. There is some realistic drug use. It looks like there is some guerilla filmmaking here. Some of the camera work is either daringly experimental or poorly amateurish. I can't decide which. I don't recognize any of these actors and they're fine. The director is using long takes and the actors are trying their best. The plot meanders and lacks drama. The intensity can't build. It's an interesting outsider film although it's not great cinema. It has some interesting aspects.

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?

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!