Fleshpot on 42nd Street

A homeless young woman hops from bed to bed and friend's apartment to friend's apartment trying to find herself and gets into all sorts of trouble with a variety of shady characters until she meets a guy she really falls for.

Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, and always unpredictable, Fleshpot on 42nd Street goes further than just about any other low budget exploitation cheapie from the era and includes real sex. Oddly enough, the sex scenes don't deter from the film or stop the film cold and only enhance it.

There's no question that Andy Milligan's film work was influenced by Andy Warhol. That doesn't downgrade the late Mr. Milligan at all-- no doubt when he was putting together plays in the 1950s, much of the aesthetic seen in VAPORS and FLESHPOT ON 42nd STREET was already intact. It's as if Warhol influenced the film-making, yet Tennessee Williams influenced the content. I thought Milligan's VAPORS (see my review) was a masterpiece, treating loneliness, desperation, and sexual confusion in a bold and honest way. You don't have to be bisexual or gay to find the humanity and universality in such a film. For me, FLESHPOT is equally fine. If VAPORS was reminiscent of early Warhol, when Andy himself was at the camera, FLESHPOT is reminiscent of the Paul Morrissey era. There's no Joe Dallesandro here, but Milligan was never about "stars" the way Warhol was. This is the story of two people who are sexually confused and sexually frustrated, and find that they have to "hustle" on every level of their existence. They may be in the gutter, but they both have somewhere inside them a spark of romance and dreams of a better life...somehow, somewhere. Neil Flanagan (aka "Lynn" Flanagan) brings a lot of depth to the role of queen Cherry Lane--sweet one moment, bitchy another moment; kind and considerate, but then thoughtless. Flanagan is, of course, familiar to any Milligan fan because of playing GURU in GURU THE MAD MONK. Diana Lewis's other credits seem to be mostly porn, but she makes the role of Dusty uncomfortably real. Everyone has known a few Dustys--the person who moves in with someone and basically provides sexual favors in return for room and board and some occasional pocket money. A number of people have BEEN Dustys at some low period in their lives. She is hard-bitten, cynical, knows how to manipulate the gullible, but she too has a dream of a better life that even the sleazy New York underbelly has not snuffed out. Some people manage to find a way out, or move somewhere else and reinvent themselves successfully, but many do not, and this is their story. The jumpy 16mm photography of Milligan's legendary Auricon camera almost becomes a participant in the film, and makes everything alive and moving, the way it does in real life. There's a lot of attention to dialogue in Milligan's 60s and early 70s work--the man may have been essentially a playwright. When it works well, Milligan's dialogue works as well as some of the later, less symbolic, more explicit Tennessee Williams plays. This being an Andy Milligan film, there are no happy endings, but this film would be phony and insincere if it offered one. FLESHPOT ON 42nd STREET is an honest look at characters living in an urban jungle, a place where if you don't take advantage of the next person you meet, that person will take advantage of you. Milligan does not judge these characters; he finds the humanity within them. This is equal to the best of the Warhol-Morrissey films, and in its own right is an impressive piece of work that seems more accurate and more rich the older I get and the more I've lived. Don't wait three decades for someone to proclaim this a masterpiece and one of the most significant "windows" into the early 70's, and for it to be shown at some film festival alongside TAXI DRIVER--score a copy now.

Knowing Andy Milligan's reputation, and judging from the video box cover, I really wasn't expecting much from this film. To tell the truth, I wasn't expecting ANYTHING from it. I rented it because I had never seen a Milligan movie and wanted to see if he was as lousy a filmmaker as his reputation says he is. Well, judging by this film, he isn't.

That's not to say that it's any kind of masterpiece, or even particularly good, or even particularly competent. Although the IMDb technical specs for this film say it was shot in 35mm, it has the grainy, poor color quality and lousy sound of 16mm, which is what it really appears to be. The acting is nothing special but not completely incompetent. Neil Flannagan as a drag queen hooker is sort of charming in a pathetic way, and has a scene where he gets into an argument in a bar that is actually pretty funny. Diana Lewis as the young girl who's the centerpiece of this isn't particularly impressive, but she gets by. Harry Reems tries too hard to be the boy next door type and doesn't really pull it off, but he's at least watchable. Amazingly for a Milligan film there's actually a coherent story line about the kinds of people who inhabited the seamy area of Manhattan known as Times Square way back before Disney bought it up and sterilized it, and Milligan actually does a pretty good job of conveying the seediness, depravity, debauchery and general scuzziness that typified the area at that time. What really sets this movie apart from others of its type that I've seen, however, is the way it treats its characters. It's not judgmental of them at all, and doesn't romanticize them as poor pathetic victims or portray them as vicious, depraved victimizers. It just shows them as people who don't have a whole lot going for them and try to get by as best they can with what they've got, doing whatever it is they have to do to make it through to the next day. In other words, they're not much different from anyone else. It took me a while to realize what he was saying with this movie because of the film's technical and narrative shortcomings--for all the good intentions he seems to have brought to this project, Milligan is still a terrible director--but the area and the subject matter were apparently close to his heart, and if Andy Milligan can be said to have made a "personal" film, this is probably it. It's worth a look to see what Times Square was really like back in the early '70s, and the film itself is actually, on the whole, pretty interesting. Check it out.

Although the film was released in 1973 it plays more like a film that was released much earlier in the 1950's and feels more like you are watching a documentary than a soft core dramatic film. The main star of the film is a prostitute named Dusty Cole (played by Laura Cannon) who we witness having sex with a variety of men from different economic classes and their varying wants. Dusty Cole comes off as a poor man's version of the much more main stream 1990 Pretty Woman starring Julia Roberts.

There certainly is no romance involved in Fleshpot on 42nd Street but a lot of grit, a platonic relationship with a transvestite named Cherry Lane (Neil Flanagan) and the lesson that money talks and bull crap walks.

I give this low budget film high marks for making the most with so little to work with and it comes off as a reality film with the hard knocks of a young prostitute's life. I give it a 7 out of 10 IMDB rating. Not so much for its cinema quality (which it lacks) but more for it's true grittiness.

Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973)

*** (out of 4)

Dusty Cole (Laura Cannon) is a woman living in New York City where she finds herself broke and in a bad place. She agrees to move in wide drag queen and prostitute Cherry Lane (Neil Flanagan) but soon she too is turning tricks for cash. Before long Dusty meets Bob (Harry Reems) and the two quickly fall in love but Cherry puts pressure on Dusty to do one more trick.

I've seen a little over a dozen Andy Milligan movies and I must admit that I rarely give them more than a half a star. The majority of his movies are BOMB rated so obviously I don't think too much of him as a director. At the same time, I understand the cult following that has built around him over the past decade. With that said, I was completely shocked at how good FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET was. The story itself isn't anything overly original but I thought the film has a certain rawness that worked in its favor and the film also benefited from a terrific performance by Cannon.

Cannon's filmography is mostly porn titles but I must say that she was excellent in the role of this woman who just wants happiness but finds one bad situation after another. I thought Cannon was extremely believable in the part and she brought a certain tenderness that made you care for the character. Flanagan, a Milligan favorite, is also quite good in the role of the drag queen. The line delivery and the way Flanagan can go from good to bad was performed very well. Reems is also good in his supporting part and look fast for Fred Lincoln of THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT fame.

Milligan does a fine job building up the story and this is certainly the best movie I've seen from him. I thought he did a very good job at making the film seem very realistic as if you were watching real people. There are some great shots of 42nd Street during its exploitation glory days that fans will enjoy. There's a lot of nudity in the film as well as some sexual violence but it just helps the drama of the story.