User Reviews

This film is interesting only to anyone familiar with the saga of Edie Sedgwick. And it seems a bit ghoulish/voyeuristic to admit watching it for that reason. Although it's often claimed to be a biography of Edie, the film really is just a painful look at a person in the final stages of mental illness-drug addiction. She died soon after filming completed, which is no surprise.

The plot of Ciao is pretty garbled by the storyline involving the character Mr. Vedecchio. The director's commentary explains that Vedecchio was only added to the movie because during shooting the rest of the cast disappeared and there was nothing else to do but beef-up this role. In fact, the whole movie is a cut-and-paste of pre-meltdown Edie (black and white footage) and post-meltdown Edie (color), with Vedecchio and Paul America tossed into the mix. The color section also introduces Butch, the drifter from Texas, who does provide some much-needed comedy.

Although Ciao, Manhattan might not be particularly entertaining on its own, the DVD extras in the Anniversary package are wonderful, and to me made the disc worth purchasing. The directors' (and Butch/Wesley's!) commentary provides the story of how this movie "directed itself", and informs much about Edie and her state of mind during the last days of her life. There is quite a bit of extra footage from the Warhol-NYC days, and some terrific stills of Edie. A nice booklet is also included.

I've seen this video a couple of times, and I've seen parts of it many times and it always gets my attention. There's something oddly hip about it, even today. Maybe it's living in an empty swimming pool or just wasting the days sleeping that appeals to me, or maybe it's seeing a topless girl with a nice body seem entirely unglamorous, or is it just the kooky narration?... but there's a fresh insanity about this that makes it worth watching. I don't know, but anyway, I dig it .

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.

This movie had a DVD release about 20 years ago and I highly recommend viewing this movie with the audio commentary because then it becomes a documentary about Edie Sedgwick. Without that commentary, you have a quasi drama(maybe a little sci fi?) movie based around a fictionalized version of Edie Sedgwick. This character is burned out from the same setting but is living in an empty pool with a palace of pies owner for a mother. She recounts her life showing off early breast implants much of the time. That's when the movie shifts to black and white archival footage. There's a rich and powerful shadowy figure stalking her. We never really know why. She had a love interest named America. Cant remember if that was Captain or Mr. A Jesus looking type character is the rich guy's henchman. The movie tries to be alot of things. Whatever plots they were trying to develop never get resolved.

What we learn in the audio commentary is what the footage actually means regarding Edie Sedgwick. Roger Vadim has a role as a doctor because he was deeply enamored with Edie Sedgwick. Some footage from a gathering in '68 is significant because it showed Edie falling apart and this happened around the time she abandoned Andy Warhol for Bob Dylan. A betrayal Warhol never overcame.

The later footage includes real ECT sessions which Sedgwick consented to have filmed. That's electroshock therapy which was something she began to enjoy as a kind of high. There's also some film of her wedding.

We learn about other people always around Andy's Factory like Barbara Polk and other models. We also get more explanation of the story they were trying to tell.

I'd give this a 8 with audio commentary by the directors and a 6 without it. On its own, its just showing footage with a vague story tying it all together.

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.

Andy Warhol darling and Factory superstar Edie Sedgwick is the star of this docudrama where she plays a thinly disguised version of herself. It makes for fairly alarming viewing though, with Sedgwick totally strung-out for the whole runtime. She died 3 months after filming was complete of an overdose - the news of this event is even edited into the end of the film. If you watch this, I daresay you will not be surprised by the proximity of this terrible turn of events, as this hitherto bright girl can barely speak properly here. There is definitely a dubious exploitative aspect to this, as we are watching someone drown to an extent, albeit Sedgwick actively did want her story told and wanted it made. Nevertheless, this remains a troubling film in many ways, yet one which is compelling and unique despite all this.

This might register as the most disturbing movie I've ever seen--and I've seen a lot of Italian cannibal movies. Edie Sedgwick, the most tragic (because most beautiful) of all contemporary tragic beauties, undergoes her last humiliation in this nightmarish fake-"underground" movie, which suggests the movie the Manson Family might have made if Sharon Tate hung around them for a few weeks. Rebounding from a stint in rehab, and a meteoric rise in the Warhol Factory world, "Susan" (Edie) frugs topless in her tent in the swimming pool behind Mummy's house, while a hitchhikin' hippie from Houston thinks in voiceover narration, "Maybe now I get me some poont!" For anyone nostalgic for the idealism of the Summer of Love, CIAO! MANHATTAN is essential viewing--its cold-blooded delectation of its terminal heroine makes old stoners like Dennis Hopper and Oliver Stone look like pantywaists. Why Sedgwick participated in this drooly, tabloid-voyeuristic cartoon of her steep decline is hard to imagine: Her famous beauty is in such staggering ruins that the filmmakers evilly pose her against a poster of her winsome debutante self to mark the damage. The experience of watching this movie resembles seeing a once-dewy ingenue dancing a jig for coal miners to buy a ten-dollar rock of crack.

A silver lipstick stained blueprint to the "Big Come Down" era, Ciao Manhattan is, by technical standards, very bad. Though the color sequences are well photographed and the older clips seem well reproduced, the narrative is clumsy and the sound is choppy. This doesn't bother me and whereas, I would like to see a coherent documentary on Edie, the flaws of the film are perfect alongside the flawed characters in the film. It possesses a very paranoid, broken and detached quality that is in keeping with a certain sub genre that has grown over the ensuing years. In music, it's everything low-fi since the LP, The Velvet Underground & Nico(1967). In film-making, it's any art film since Andy Warhol's Empire(1964).

The film is, quite by incident, the very quintessence of the dangers of mixing cinema verity lifestyle with a diet of tablets which include a total disregard for the wages of sin, in favor of "really living". (i.e. on film, on drugs and off reality). What illustrates this is that Susan(Edie)isn't really acting in this film, but seems to be fooling herself (with coaxing from the filmmakers, no doubt) into thinking that she is, simply because, she's using the name Susan and is probably on LSD most of the time. It's a kind of twisted defense mechanism that Edie is using to distance herself from her own personal reality. This is ironic, considering the fact that her personal reality is the focus of the entire film and that her(Edie's) own mortal coil is unraveling faster then footage can record it. But, the cameras are tenacious and keep rolling thru her staged shock treatments(a true event) to her "last chance at a normal life" marriage(a true event captured on 8mm complete with a Warholsque posterized sequence) and finally a news clipping of her obituary.

The film serves well as a cautionary tale to the contemporary modern girl, with Susan(Edie) as the prototype modern girl, trying anything new, without regard to the consequences. i.e. forced stardom, derelict emotions, mood management drugs, radical psychotherapy techniques and even a botched breast job. This has all become a common lifestyle today(in 2006), perfected by time and human casualty. Susan(Edie) was an incidental trailblazer in a film(lifestyle) where the sun shines too white hot for human beings to bare it, yet is too intoxicating for the obsessive ones to turn away from. Like a pretty, lactose intolerant, lab rat that keeps eating the cheese in spite of the gas pains, Susan(Edie) was caught in a maze of learned behavior and couldn't resist it's unhealthy escapism's, even though she must have felt the grim reaper's hand on her emaciated shoulder. As long as she was feeding her head and all eyes where on her, she really lived. She only "snuffed it" after filming had concluded and she was faced the realism of a sober, off camera existence.

The book "Edie, An American Biography" is required reading if you want to get the most out of this film and may be all you can take. *Not for the mentally squeamish.

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.

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.

Definitely an odd little time killer about Edie Sedgwick, an Andy Warhol fledgling who has fallen on hard times, and is living in a swimming pool in Beverly Hills. Very trippy strange little flick, more so pasted together with old clips of Edie in some early Warhol films. Would have served a better purpose as a documentary, but definitely worth checking out. Obviously this is not for all tastes.

There's enough black and white Edie footage here to keep ones attention, but the sight of a thoroughly dissipated poor little rich girl on the verge of death makes this the moral equivalent of a snuff film. It's a bit like The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield only more depressing.

The very sad tale of Socialite & Warhol Muse Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971) who effectively plays herself in this odd Film, It took 5 years to film what with Edie in and out of Mental institutions so it doesn't make a great deal of sense, it follows her life in a large part from the time she left Warhol's 'Factory' and what the life of excess drugs did to her sanity, Edie was such a beautiful Fragile girl - who finally got her head together and got married (her wedding day video is edited into the end of the movie) but it was too late, her husband woke up on a Morning in November 1971 and found her dead beside him, she had died in her sleep from overdosing on her medication she was 28 - 'Ciao' was released months later and was virtually ignored on it's original release, but thankfully with the Jean Stein/George Plimpton Biography from 1982 and David Weisman (Co-Producer of 'Ciao' keeping her memory alive) and the well intentioned but disappointing and critically panned 'Factory Girl' which was sadly hacked to pieces by the Weinstein's - Edie is now more famous and popular than she ever was!

RIP EDIE

10/10

This was the worst movie that I ever endured. It produced physical symptoms in the form of a migraine...not only in me, but in another unfortunate friend who was subjected to it. This is a piece of trash in it's purest form. Don't bother with it.

The movie starts off very WTF like, but slowly draws the viewer in. From knowing little of Edie Sedgewick other than the movie Factory Girl. This movie gives a much better and honest insight of her life through a very murky, unrealistic and disjointed array of characters. Amazingly, the whole idea of the movie wasn't to document Edie's own rise and fall. But more as a dramatic piece based on the 'Poor Little Rich Girl' that fascinated Andy and many at The Factory that knew Edie before the general public did. The story was loosely cobbled together from Edie's personal history, the hoopla of the 60's counter culture and art and fashion revolution, and the deflation and enterprising of the whole hippie drug and free love spirit that was doomed by the end of the decade. Edie herself was literally a 'last minute fill in' to play the lead of Susan. As the initial actress went on to other projects, So in a strange twist Edie was brought in to play someone else playing herself with liberty. As surreal, dislocated, and conspiracy strewn as the movie is, it becomes that much more meaningful and believable when one realizes it's Edie more or less 'living the part'. So what was initially drawn up as a 'high end titty film' to profit from the drive in draw (and Edie certainly shows a great pair through the majority of the film); turns into this unwitting vigil recounting her actual past, current demise, and tragic and untimely end. A rich movie of a cheap life played so realistically by a has been that will forever be Edie.

There are two reasons i've looked up this movie. The first is the Factory Girl (2006) with Sienna Miller in the lead role, which had mostly mainstream approach to Edie's life. In comparison to that Ciao! Manhattan is a ockumentary, although unintentionally dark.

The second is Madonna's video for Deeper and Deeper, which somewhat capitalized on Edie's image during her Warhol years. At the time of the video's release, internet and DVD were the tools of the future, so finding more information had to wait.

Since i know more about Edie Sedgwick now, i can only say that Ciao! Manhattan mercilessly exploits her even after her death. The black-and-white footage is showing some of her pastimes while being Warhol's muse or shortly thereafter. There is nothing glamorous about it, since we know that chemistry is boosting her "creativity". The footage in color displays the consequences of those wild years.

In terms of, or absence of, plot Ciao! Manhattan is in line with avant-garde contemporary movies of the era. On the other hand it shows the outcome of longterm substance abuse. It was unclear to me whether Edie was acting or brainstorming during the color sequences.

We may argue that Edie had already been in need of professional help even before meeting Andy Warhol and his bunch. But even then Ciao! Mahnattan send shivers up your spine while showing her life being wasted while authors get credits for artistic merit.

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.

It's been over 30 years since I saw this movie and I still think about it regularly, because at the time it made a great impression on me. It's mysterious, and has an attraction the way Henry Miller has and the writers if the Beat generation.There was good music too, I recall: at the end of the film. Problem: I've never seen it again and I would love to. But where?