Ham-&-Existentialism

The Connection. Opium is the religion of the people in this picture. As it begins eight heroin addicts are flobbing around a dismal flat in Manhattan, neither drunk nor asleep, neither dead nor alive. They lean against the walls, they stare with empty eyes. Sometimes they splutter obscenities at each other for no reason sometimes they babble mindlessly about themselves. They are waiting. Waiting to make The Connection, "waiting for The Cowboy to gallop in on a white horse."

The Cowboy appears as a Negro dressed entirely in white--that is to say, as a union of opposites, as a completeness possible perhaps only in God. He comes moreover as a redeemer. One by one as through the veil of a sanctuary, he leads the junkies through a door marked TOILET. One by one he injects them with an elixir that washes away their wretchedness, that raises them from the living dead, that transports them to "existence on another plane.''

This ham-and-existentialist Zenwich put together by a young American absurdist named Jack Gelber and first served in an off-Broadway theater, was eagerly gobbed up by sensation-hungry hundreds of let's -go-down-to-the-Villagers. But what was fundamentally wrong with the play remains fundamentally wrong in the film it is not life, it is not art, it is not interesting. Philosophically, it is an uninspired restatement of Waiting for Godot; esthetically, it is just a drop in the Beckett.

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