Fleshpot on 42nd Street – SLASH Filmfestival

Let’s be frank right off the bat: Fleshpot on 42nd Street has very little in common with the other films in this program—first and foremost because it’s a melodrama at heart. It tells the grim story of sex workers Dusty Cole and Cherry Lane, working the Deuce in its most licentious era of red-light joints, peep shows, grindhouses, and shooting galleries. They’re battered, but they’re still in the game. One day, Dusty meets a guy named Bob who might just whisk them both off the street, but . . . We don’t see much of the Deuce itself, but the smoky bars and rundown apartments conjure what life might have looked like—and sounded like, and smelled like—back then. A Fassbinderian odyssey. Like, seriously. (Olaf Möller)

OPENING SHORT FILM
Vapors
Andy Milligan, US 1965, 32′

Undoubtably the most accurate and poignant depiction of the gay male bathhouse scene ever committed to celluloid. (Bruce LaBruce)

For this screening, strict age restrictions apply (18+).

Andy Milligan

(1929–1991), an American pioneer, outsider, and auteur, began his career as an actor and off-off-Broadway director/costumer. He turned to film in the 1960s, quickly moving from Nouvelle Vague influences to exploitation and horror. Self-taught and developing an immediately recognizable style, his films would often explore themes that included repressed sexuality and homosexuality, dysfunctional families, and transgression. Some memorable examples are his first short, Vapors (1965), Nightbirds (1970), Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972), and Carnage (a.k.a. Hell House, 1984). A storied character, to put it politely, or “very tormented, and very intelligent,” as Nicolas Winding Refn once wrote, many of his films today are considered lost; others, like his early, post-apocalyptic The Degenerates (1967), have only recently been rediscovered.

To the full programme

Andy Milligan

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