New York Daily News
May 19, 1972

“HEAT”

By Rex Reed


       A simultaneously moving and hilarious film called Heat is one of the happiest surprises in Cannes. It establishes Paul Morrissey as one of the screen's major directors and provides Sylvia Miles with the finest role of her career. Heat is a kind of underground version of Sunset Boulevard with Joe Dallesandro as a cross between William Holden and Little Beaver, an ex-teen star in westerns now living in a seedy Hollywood motel, and Sylvia Miles as the cross between Gloria Swanson and Lana Turner who chews him up like a Venus fly-trap.

       On the surface level, the film paints instant word pictures of these seedy rejects from the silver screen with dialogue that is dizzy with improvised comic invention. "Voila!" says Sylvia, a faded, practically unknown movie star named Sally Todd, as she shows a stud through her 36-room Hollywood mansion in a bikini. "If there's anyone you'd like to impress, you could meet them here." Later, fighting with her butch juvenile delinquent daughter whose girl friend has just used her for a human ashtray, she wails: "Listen, I want you to stop going around telling everybody you're a lesbian. You're not a lesbian -- this is just a temporary thing. This is Hollywood, people will believe you!" There is something in the line that touches while it amuses, for it gets to the heart of a desperate has-been forgotten by time, lucky to get on a few TV game shows, but blind to reality and trying to keep a stranglehold on respectability.

       Heat is filled with such moments of truth about the comic loss of human dignity. It has the faded blue print look Hollywood has, as though even the chlorophyll in the plants has been burned by midnight sun. Joe Dalessandro is the male Candy Bergen, passive, occasionally baffled, always bored, like the beautiful, empty faces of Malibu surfers, and across the retina of his eyes the dramas around him unfold without ever connecting with his brain. Sylvia Miles is a ravishing shark, eating her way through the film and swallowing it like some private, emotional banquet, leaving everyone else for fishbait along the way. And the movie that sprawls casually around them like an open wound delves profoundly and intelligently into the psychology of loneliness and materialism, the lethargy and waste of Hollywood's plastic people who cover up with another coat of sun-tan lotion, full of inertia and desperation of people going nowhere.

       Heat is the most important film to ever emerge from the tropic underground movement, providing freshness and excitement in a dreary Cannes Film Festival to which the establishment has brought large doses of irrelevance and tedium.