Rolling Stone
November 23, 1972

“HEAT”
written, photographed and directed by Paul Morrissey

By Greg Ford

       Paul Morrissey and his coworkers at the Andy Warhol Factory have manufactured a quietly touching, humanely humorous study of modern Hollywood, recognizing their long enchantment with the mythologies of the place, its on and off-screen folklore. Warhol is indebted to Hollywood, even if he and the Factory people are thoroughgoing auto-didacts, starting from unbelievably minimal cinema, slowly advancing from amorphous styles to more linear arrangements of shots, gradually succumbing to sound, color, more linking and editing. Yet, most significantly, they always have mimicked Hollywood's star system, emulating that charmed coterie of goddesses and gods by adopting their own sidereal clique, a privileged club that included Viva! and Ultra Violet and Taylor Mead and... but of course you've heard of them. After all, they're superstars.

       It is apt that Morrissey makes a picture which counterpoises the divinely romantic filmland of yore with its direr, more lackluster truths nowadays, having placed together in his previous Trash the Immortal and the Collapsible, as dolorous heart-felt soap-opera speeches were imparted by a stringy transvestite in a squalid cellar lodging. Heat opens with clips that crystallize the thought of a Hollywood sadly fallen short of its utopian potential: the shambles of the old Fox studio, just torn down, with the film's anti-hero, Joe Dallesandro, moseying through the rain.

       Several narrative annotations in Morrissey's Heat footnote the seminal fifties story about a compromised Hollywood - Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard , where a silent screen siren, jilted by her kept lover, stages multiple conniptions and temper tantrums, ultimately guns down the cad, leaving his body ebbing and bobbing in her swimming pool. But Morrissey's Hollywood is more beggarly, in a funnier state of decrepitude, his heroine not an aging eminent vamp idol but an aging unknown grade-B starlet who, once rejected by Joe Dallesandro, would like to pine as thunderously as her Sunset Boulevard forerunner but botches it up, destined to live a lamentably rotten grade-B life. Heat crescendos with lugubrious pleadings, her fiery, rancorous fulminations. She pulls the trigger but forgets to load her avenging weapon and disgustedly tosses the thing away, so at this film's end the revolver itself plunges into the drink and not Joe's callous, bemusedly-postured pool-side form.

       In spirit, Heat has no connection with Wilder's tight, inexorably spiraling psycho-drama. Though the plot matters more than usual for a Factory film, Heat's strangeness and magic still comes from its splendid improvisations. The most laudable thing about Warhol's and Morrissey's informal cinema, with its withdrawn and noninterpretive shots, is the leeway and elbow-room it grants its performers, always permitting their private nuances. This presumably unchecked, unrestrained acting, with its zany irrelevant real-life snippets, queer phraseologies, meaningless chit-chat, dropped lines, missed cues and non sequiturs, is entertaining enough to persuade a viewer temporarily that all other acting in all other films is over-rehearsed, insufferably coaxed, coached and chalk-marked.
       Hence dynamics of role-playing apply to Sylvia Miles' part as the temperamental ex-B star. Under Morrissey's indulgent direction, Miles has the license to take her part sometimes seriously, sometimes not-so-seriously.

       She gains the audiences complicity as she alternates between really living her part and wryly detaching herself. She upbraids her presumptuous lesbian daughter for demanding so much bread ("Do you think I'm a walking checkbook?"), but seems just slightly more chagrined when her rivalrous offspring attempts to seduce Joe for herself ("Humph! She can't even make a good dyke"). She frets about the sources of revenue in comic excess ("My TV game-show doesn't keep me in hairspray!"), but, amazingly, keeps her deportment when having to cope with buzzard-like marginal figures who gloat over her fall from stardom, a jaded talentless movie producer and a snide columnist, popping impudent badgering interview questions, forever insinuating a scandal. ("No, my daughter doesn't go to cesspools in Santa Monica...").

       Heat could be called a companion film to Flesh and Trash, each spotting Joe Dallesandro as a youthful urban wanderer. Joe generally seems a bastard descendant of the classic passive western hero, with the mien and physique of a "strong, silent type," frugally muttering nonplussed yups and nonplussed nopes, like a Gary Cooper with the modesty and abstention subtracted. In Flesh, Joe was a successful and potent male prostitute, while in Trash he skulked back with a shoulder-length shag and was an impotent junkie, unsuccessfully trying to sell his body for support of his enervating habit. Each film is structured by his cyclic, ambi-sexual visitations upon a derelict clientele, but here Joe is even positively spiffy, regaining his hustler's proclivities and prowess but now playing for higher stakes, making rogue's progress as a money-grubbing heel, his workaday New York rounds replaced with a more constricted L.A. orbit between two featured way- stations, the faded star's palatial domicile and a flop-house motel, the Tropicana a bevy of Warhol castaways holing up at this latter location, a true asylum for the perverse (among them, Pat Ast as the fat and formidable landlady and the late Andrea Feldman as Miles' rash, unpredictable daughter - a performance so good and peppered with idiosyncrasies that it would require an additional essay to do the actress justice).
       Admirers of Trash and earlier Factory enterprises should not be vexed that the new film Heat so closely verges on normal fictive movie-making, doing without the frontal denuding and violently physical shots such as blood filling up a syringe or clotting at the puncture of a vein. The corporeality of Heat is much less forced, but still very present. Here, again, Morrissey obtains a terrific sense of tangibility and body-contact with unflinching recording of such actions as long, massaging fingernails scraping down a bare neck and back, chlorine stinging somebody's cigarette burns, a retarded "kid brother" whacking off beneath a petite little-girl's nightgown, the mutual exchanging of once-overs at the first meeting of Sylvia and Joe.
       From project to project Morrissey augments composition and choice of location, seeming to begin from a commonsensical reaction to the cities he wants to capture on film. Born of a vision of New York as cramped and confined, Trash's major set was a dungeon-like hovel, all the backgrounds dull-finished flat planes. In Heat, Morrissey's photography of the cavernous den in Miles's Bel Air mansion has a new far-reaching depth, and his surveillance of the outdoor courtyard at the fleabag motel has a new tallness, spatially relating the two separate tiers of suites. Using Hollywood's wider spaces, then, he also seeks to catch its climate, bleaching exteriors with light, implying a constant pounding sun. Yet still, certain flatulent critics may summarily dismiss this Factory film because of the apparent simplicity of its stationary camera-placements, perhaps unwilling to understand stylistic postulates that are so reliant on acting and objective distancing of acting. Morrissey has perfected a special style in which numerous flecks of crude reality strike against a story scrim, a style that compounds documentary and fiction.

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