GEORGE CUKOR ON THE FILMS OF PAUL MORRISSEY

GEORGE CUKOR: ...He makes a marvelous kind of world, and a marvelous kind of mischief, holding nothing back and just watching it happen. I applaud him for doing that most difficult thing, combining semipornography and comedy...No, not semipornography. His films are not sexually arousing. He collects grotesqueries, like Mr. Fellini. And some of them happen to be sexual grotesqueries.

GAVIN LAMBERT: He holds nothing back because he doesn’t take sides. There’s no comment implied--and it frees his people. They find themselves in a climate where they can go all the way.

CUKOR: “Personal expression” is a much abused expression, but these films are a real personal expression...Nobody has done anything like it. The selection of people, the casting, is absolutely brilliant and impertinent. The life they see, the gutter they see, or the world they see is so funny and agonizing, and they see it so vividly, with such humor...such original humor. I’m lost in admiration. I adored Lonesome Cowboys.. And Flesh. And Trash ....And their performances are brilliant. Joe Dallesandro does some enormously difficult things--walking around in the nude in a completely unselfconscious way, that scene when he talks to the baby in Flesh, and when he gives himself an overdose of heroin in Trash...he really made me understand more than any other films, what a drug addict was. The way you see him shutting himself off from all interest in life, going limp, it’s chilling and it’s beautifully done.

LAMBERT: And in Flesh he plays a hustler with such amiability and no guilt. It’s the antithesis of Midnight Cowboy.

CUKOR: Nobody has any kind of guilt in these pictures. None of the attitudes are conventional--you never see a tear--that’s extremely refreshing! I don’t like sordid things, but these pictures I luxuriate in. They’re so bold and undiluted and really new.

ON CUKOR by Gavin Lambert 1972 Putnam ISBN: 0399109250 pp 153-4