The Connection - based on the Living Theatre's production of Jack Gelber's play - is a film about junkies waiting their drug connection inside a seedy New York City apartment. Directed by a remarkable woman and a crucial filmmaker: Shirley Clarke (1919-1997), this film is a landmark of the American New Wave movement. Utilizing a New York version of Italian neo-realism, Clarke's work remains the best expression of marginal life in that era. It is a frank study of heroin addicts - so frank that it was banned by the New York State film censors. The Connection combined "real" people with such familiar professional performers as William Redfield (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Roscoe Lee Browne (narrator of Babe: Pig in the City), and Warren Finnerty (Easy Rider). The music featured throughout is some of the best jazz of that era that you will ever see, composed by the pianist-writer Freddie Redd (described by Ira Gitler as 'one of the warmer disciples of the Bud Powell school'), and performed by his quartet with altoist Jackie McLean, bassist Michael Mattos and drummer Larry Ritchie. The film itself will remind you of one of Cassavetes early films, think 'Shadows,' but it's the music that will make it priceless. The Connection received a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
"A quintessential work of '60s cinema, this harrowing depiction of junkies waiting for a score is lightened by the performance of the jazzmen who are also waiting for their fix." -John Sumilliani, Philadelphia Inquirer
