User Reviews

It has more of a narrative flow then most of Warhol's works. The characters talk like a Oscar Wilde book giving the piece some humor, and the visuals are well shot. At the end of the day it's a usual Warhol film in the sense that it's a bunch of people chattering about nothing, but if u like that sort of thing, like me, I'd check it out.

This film was quite boring and lacking of a plot.

An aging, wealthy gay man admires a young boy-toy sunning himself on the beach from his beach house patio. Soon accompanied by his fag-hag neighbor and friend and veteran hustler the three of them make a wager as to who will bed the male beach bunny first. The only other scene in the film is of the young man and the hustler grooming in the mirror after a shower where the younger boy is eagerly extracting advice from the older man about whether or not to sell his body and how to go about it. The older man uses this as an opportunity to win the bet and selfishly steers the boy into a life of prostitution in hopes of seducing him. The film ends anticlimactically with the boy trying to digest all of the advice given to him by a slew of people with only their own interests at heart.

I believe this film is worth seeing merely for nostalgia purposes. If you're a Warhol fan you wouldn't want to say you haven't seen it. It is interesting for conversation sake, but a quality film by no means.

This film is a timeless piece of Americana that cuts across social classes. There are few clues about its date - the dial-a-hustler plot device could easily be eliminated without detriment to the film - it could be last summer, or fifty years ago.

Ed Hood is arch, infuriating and very funny. Although, as he says, he is very well educated, he quotes Dante in a disjointed way, combining the initial lines of the Inferno with lines 47-48 of Canto XX of the Paradiso, and appears to believe Kali is a Syrian goddess, Blame it on the alcohol. He is a compelling old dominator at 29, the same age as Sugar Plum Fairy (Joe Campbell). The screen lost a great character actor when Ed retreated to Cambridge to pursue his PhD, boys and Gallo burgundy.

Ed dismissively assigns Genevieve to the bottom of the homosexual caste system: a "fag-hag", but nothing can disguise her beauty and joi de vivre. She did not, to my knowledge, and sadly, appear in another film. Why, one asks, do the most talented and beautiful make a meteoric appearance and then disappear? Viz. Natalie Pascaud in Les Vacances de M. Hulot.

Paul America is pretty convincing as a football player about to go wrong. He comes across as very young, and Ed as old, although the age difference is only 8 years. America is not innocent, exactly - more cautious and impassive. "I just want to get high." The hard, slick, defeated Campbell tries the usual queer come-ons in the bathroom scene, and then realizes that he needn't bother - America will let anybody do anything to him.

Poignant and eerily convincing is the final procession of supplicants before America - each with essentially the same pitch - the girl, the queer and the androgyne try to convince America to go run away together. Poignant because we know that America will not accept any of them. Ed Hood's dark glasses, beer-sucking, display of money and willingness to address the camera directly are the scariest and most fascinating.