Remaining session: Sun 2 Aug 09 2:30 PM
Genre: Documentary made by a relation
Director: Nicole Haeusser
Producer: Vedra Mehagian Dallesandro
Immortalised by Lou Reed in the classic hit ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ (“Little Joe never once gave it away…….I said, hey Joe, talk a walk on the wild side”) and immortalised by photographer Annie Leibowitz on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Joe Dallesandro was the Warhol ‘superstar’ who once had the world at his feet. The young New York punk got lucky and escaped a life of petty crime when he bumped into Andy Warhol at a party and was immediately put into one of the Warhol Factory’s experimental films. With his chiselled good looks and long flowing locks Dallesandro quickly became an underground sensation, and was partly responsible for the sensational reaction the films, mainly directed by Warhol protégé Paul Morrissey, garnered worldwide in the late sixties and early seventies. Titles like LONESOME COWBOYS, FLESH, TRASH and HEAT will be well known to many and LITTLE JOE, which plays at this year’s MIFF, is a well made documentary about the enigmatic actor, and we learn much from and about the man who parlayed a little talent into a long and varied career.
The Joe Dallesandro in this doco is more Robert De Niro/Harvey Keitel than the good looking hunky star of the many early clips featured here, but his sense of humour and irony is intact as he describes, in a series of straight to camera monologues, answers and reflections his adventures with Warhol (“I never once had a real conversation with him”), his life in Italian quickie films after the successes of the final two schlock-horrors FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN and BLOOD FOR DRACULA (“I was gonna be the next Clint Eastwood”) and his appearances in such mainstream films as Francis Ford Coppola’s THE COTTON CLUB and Steven Soderbergh’s THE LIMEY.
LITTLE JOE delivers a fascinating glimpse into an unexpected yet ultimately fulfilling life (on the wild side!) while also offering an illuminating insider’s look at the Warhol phenomenon.
MIKE CHILDS
—> MIFF page 3058 – LITTLE JOE
—> Other MIFF:
Australian Film Review 