A Hangup for Sweet Trash: The arthouse-exploitation of John Hayes
A Hangup for Sweet Trash: The arthouse-exploitation of John Hayes
By Robin Bougie
www.cinemasewer.com
The late director John Hayes deserves to be better known amongst film nerds. He made one of my all-time favorite 1960s sexploitation films (1968's Help Wanted Female), and one of my all-time favorite 1970s hardcore movies (1976's Baby Rosemary). In between those two releases he made various trashy genre movies with marginal art-house aspirations. I'm talking about: The Cut Throats (1969), Walk The Angry Beach (1969), The Hang Up (1970), Sweet Trash (1970), Dream No Evil (1970), Fandango (1970), Garden of the Dead (1972), Grave of the Vampire (1972), Convict's Women (1973), and Mama's Dirty Girls (1974).
Neither of these movies had very good posters, apparently. Yeesh.
After 45 years of obscurity following very short theatrical runs, two of those movies finally saw their first wide-release in the form of a drive-in collection double bill DVD in July 2015 from Vinegar Syndrome releasing, one of the most important genre film labels on the planet. Sweet Trash and The Hang Up were edited, written, directed, and produced by Hayes, and released via his low-rent production company, Clover films, which he started back in 1965 with a friend named Daniel Cady. Their recent home format unveiling seems to have been mostly overlooked, but I can tell you unequivocally that this dvd is totally worth checking into.
Sweet Trash (1970) is strange as fuck and not at all what most anyone would be expecting. From what I can tell, a wealthy organized crime family that manages willing women as expressionless concubines takes directions on how to run their unlawful business from one of those old 'punch card' computers the size of a small room. It's compelling to think of all of the cool places you could go with that as a paranoid, dystopian concept, but right from the get-go the whole thing is thrown on its ear when the computer randomly orders the crime syndicate to try to force a drunken Irish dockworker named Mike Donovan to join their group. Why John Hayes came up with that is anyone's guess (he passed away in August 2000, making it hard to ask him), but the mob gamely and unquestioningly spend the rest of the movie trying to do so, and Mike wanders around confused about why they're spending the rest of the movie trying to do so.
Party at Mike's place! You're all invited as long as you love being drunk!
At first they take a non-violent tact to try to enlist the lush and rope him in via loan sharking. Mike already owes them $4,000 and things only get worse when they make it so he loses big in a back-room poker game in a run-down skid-row bar (with a frankly amazing strip show that the movie thankfully pauses to watch). But the crime syndicate is taken aback when the down-on-his-luck Donovan doesn't come quietly, and decides instead to go hide out on Coney Island with a hooker. To navigate what is a fairly surreal passage of time, he goes on to shack up with various working class women who find him vastly more compelling than the audience does.
Shitty bar, amazing floorshow.
While the confusing plot, agonizing pacing and annoying Irish jig score didn't do too much for me whatsoever, the cinematography (by Paul Hipp and Henning Schellerup) and location footage of Manhattan and Brooklyn is splendid. While I think the casting of Duncan McLeod as Mike Donovan wasn't quite right, I can't deny that he and the rest of the cast have their acting at a level reserved for the best drive-in exploitation movies of this era, and there is even some gratuitous full frontal nudity (on the gals only - the guys wear pants). It's also fun seeing one of Hayes' fellow directors, Ted Roter, take a spot as the sleazy villain of the piece and hold his own. The shootout finale was also surprisingly and refreshingly bloody (Early squib work! Cool!). The lesser of these two movies, Sweet Trash manages to be strangely compelling and atmospheric, and days after seeing it I was still digesting it. I personally find that's usually the sign of an important movie, or at the very least, a polarizing one.
No, I won't serve your computer overlords! Hope you like getting shotgunned in the face, mob-dudes!
Released that same year, John Hayes begins The Hangup (1970) in a transvestite bar with a nautical theme, a unique campy location that grabs your attention right out of the starting gate. The overtly outre clientele of this colorful Los Angeles bar collect to watch a truly head-turning, orgasmic performance from vintage adult magazine centerfold and sexploitation starlet, Bambi Allen. An early adopter of breast implants, Bambi would -- like many of the silicone-injected guinea pigs of the very flawed cosmetic procedure -- be killed by complications directly related to her hard, awkward-looking chest augmentation.
Pan over to the two most unconvincing cross-dressers in the room, and sure enough -- they are undercover LAPD vice detectives, who are of course, in high demand amongst the eligible horny bachelors in the room. After jetting back to a skeezy motel and revealing that it's a bust, the lead vice cop, Robert Walsh (Clover Films regular, Tony Vorno, who also starred in Help Wanted Female) angrily head-butts one of the friendly Johns into submission.
We're here for a good time, not a long time.
"I spit on scum... I'm a cop!", Walsh will later bark at his partner (Eric Stern) as they take off their make-up."It's bad enough these weirdos run free in this town without having to impersonate them!"
After a weary day smashing heads and putting the fear of god into sexual deviants residing in the city of Angels, Walsh trudges home to his dinky rooming house flat, where he whines to his buxom redhead landlady, Miss Howard about all the clowns that make his existence so trying. "I catch queers!”, he explains as if he wished the whole world would just explode. “I catch Homosexuals, transvestites, child molesters, pimps, pushers, whores..."
Seemingly wooed by his homophobia, grated nerves and lack of patience for anything other than 1950s suburban values, she takes it upon herself to try to bed him. He's obviously hesitant, but the flesh is weak, and after some skillfully staged scenes of awkward enticement, an avocado-green bathroom tryst with Miss Howard takes place as he grinds against her on the filthy floor next to her toilet. Soon disgusted with the entire scene, he gets up, leaves her there to writhe, and goes back to his room where he rubs one out awkwardly while standing in a closet doorway. It was at this point that I fell in love with this bitter, bitter movie.
Beer is the only thing that makes sense anymore.
The next evening he's off to another den of debauchery to usher some more perverts into jail cells. This time he straps on his leathers and roars his motor bike on over to a costume party orgy at a fancy whorehouse mansion out in the country. With a cult vibe in full effect, consider this part of the movie a sort of welfare Eyes Wide Shut. Taken into a back room for extreme humpy-pumpy, Walsh meets our lead actress, a young prostitute runaway from Salinas named Laurie (Sharon Matt). Despite clearly being there to bring in the whores and pimps he despises so much, after a quiet, meaningful bedside conversation with the wide-eyed and innocent Laurie, Walsh has a sudden change of heart.
"I don't know why I'm doin' this!" the LAPD vice officer hisses, not just at her, but at himself as he shakes his head and escorts her out a back door, just as the police raid of the palatial bawdy house goes into full effect. With nowhere else to take her, he escorts the girl back to his smelly, dumpy bachelor apartment and begins calling her 'Angel'. Laurie does her bit to make herself useful (she's concerned about his seeming inability to do household chores) and being a child of the sexual revolution, she does that while mostly naked. The two of them seem much like father and daughter (both in age discrepancy and attitude) throughout most of their interactions, but fascinatingly also quickly start acting like a married couple. And before long that includes the... um, more intimate elements of marriage as well. (Slide whistle sound FX)
In his seminal 2007 hardcover tome dedicated to the wildest vintage american exploitation features, Nightmare USA, author Stephen Thrower wonders openly if screenwriter Paul Schrader may have been highly inspired by a viewing of The Hang Up. “The similarities to Taxi Driver are uncanny”, Thrower writes. “Walsh's lines about hatred of perversion are a virtual ringer for Travis Bickle's musings, and when Walsh decides to rescue Angel from the imminent vice-bust because he believes she's an innocent in need of his protection, we see the relationship between Travis and Iris in nascent form.”
Just a middle aged vice cop and his teenage fuck-buddy. Nothing more to see here. Move along.
Like Bickle, Walsh is the epitome of a damaged, conflicted character. He makes efforts to identify with the fresh-faced girl, such as when he buys a giant bag of celery -- "Organic stuff" he gruffly calls it -- but then he weirdly eats the stalks like he's eating a cob of corn, seemingly never having put a green vegetable in his mouth before. With nothing but contempt the younger generation, sexual deviancy and his own urges, he has trouble coming to terms with any of it. Walsh feels morally in the right for rescuing a teenage runaway from the streets, but knows he's stepped far over the line by taking her on as his live-in lover rather than placing her in protective custody or getting her back home. He's in over his head.
He can't seem to help himself, though, and we witness him -- via the power of pussy -- shed his skin. At work is one thing, but in private the hardened debauchery-hating urban vice cop melts away, replaced by a free spirit who likes going out into the country with his supple, pink-nippled flower child. Transformed, he literally frolics through open pastures with her before settling down to boff on a picnic blanket amongst other naked 20-something back-to-nature orgyists. Considering that Walsh looks like an angrier Mr Howl from Gilligan's island crossed with Glenn Ford, this is not just a cop going outside his comfort zone with a forbidden affair, this is a motherfuckin' mid-life crisis dialed up to 11.
With his life turned upside down, Walsh is utterly unprepared for what happens next. In a great twist that I didn't see coming at all, the beautiful young prostitute is revealed to have a secret that will change everything. It's a revelation that will usher the Walsh character even further down his spiral of destruction and the movie into what the dvd packaging aptly describes as “a powerful indictment of law-enforcement hypocrisy” and “a creative commentary on the sexual revolution and human nature.” Sure it was made quickly and on a tight budget, but this is bold, solidly-paced, impressive auteur shit, man. This is what film noir would have been like in the 1940s if they were allowed to have nudity and overt sexual situations. This is John Hayes bringing his 'A' game.
Speaking of overt sexuality, it's worth noting that the trailer for the movie included on the dvd has full frontal beaver shots that never appear in the movie, with some scenes in the preview clearly restaged with the actors now unclothed. Wondering if perhaps a different, harder, version of the movie is out there somewhere, I contacted Vinegar Syndrome's Joe Rubin, who explained that the beautiful print on their dvd came directly from the original camera negative for The Hangup. “Hotter outtakes would be used in the trailer to sell the film”, Rubin noted. “That was common. Harry Novak did that a lot too.”
By Robin Bougie
www.cinemasewer.com
The late director John Hayes deserves to be better known amongst film nerds. He made one of my all-time favorite 1960s sexploitation films (1968's Help Wanted Female), and one of my all-time favorite 1970s hardcore movies (1976's Baby Rosemary). In between those two releases he made various trashy genre movies with marginal art-house aspirations. I'm talking about: The Cut Throats (1969), Walk The Angry Beach (1969), The Hang Up (1970), Sweet Trash (1970), Dream No Evil (1970), Fandango (1970), Garden of the Dead (1972), Grave of the Vampire (1972), Convict's Women (1973), and Mama's Dirty Girls (1974).
Neither of these movies had very good posters, apparently. Yeesh.
After 45 years of obscurity following very short theatrical runs, two of those movies finally saw their first wide-release in the form of a drive-in collection double bill DVD in July 2015 from Vinegar Syndrome releasing, one of the most important genre film labels on the planet. Sweet Trash and The Hang Up were edited, written, directed, and produced by Hayes, and released via his low-rent production company, Clover films, which he started back in 1965 with a friend named Daniel Cady. Their recent home format unveiling seems to have been mostly overlooked, but I can tell you unequivocally that this dvd is totally worth checking into.
Sweet Trash (1970) is strange as fuck and not at all what most anyone would be expecting. From what I can tell, a wealthy organized crime family that manages willing women as expressionless concubines takes directions on how to run their unlawful business from one of those old 'punch card' computers the size of a small room. It's compelling to think of all of the cool places you could go with that as a paranoid, dystopian concept, but right from the get-go the whole thing is thrown on its ear when the computer randomly orders the crime syndicate to try to force a drunken Irish dockworker named Mike Donovan to join their group. Why John Hayes came up with that is anyone's guess (he passed away in August 2000, making it hard to ask him), but the mob gamely and unquestioningly spend the rest of the movie trying to do so, and Mike wanders around confused about why they're spending the rest of the movie trying to do so.
Party at Mike's place! You're all invited as long as you love being drunk!
At first they take a non-violent tact to try to enlist the lush and rope him in via loan sharking. Mike already owes them $4,000 and things only get worse when they make it so he loses big in a back-room poker game in a run-down skid-row bar (with a frankly amazing strip show that the movie thankfully pauses to watch). But the crime syndicate is taken aback when the down-on-his-luck Donovan doesn't come quietly, and decides instead to go hide out on Coney Island with a hooker. To navigate what is a fairly surreal passage of time, he goes on to shack up with various working class women who find him vastly more compelling than the audience does.
Shitty bar, amazing floorshow.
While the confusing plot, agonizing pacing and annoying Irish jig score didn't do too much for me whatsoever, the cinematography (by Paul Hipp and Henning Schellerup) and location footage of Manhattan and Brooklyn is splendid. While I think the casting of Duncan McLeod as Mike Donovan wasn't quite right, I can't deny that he and the rest of the cast have their acting at a level reserved for the best drive-in exploitation movies of this era, and there is even some gratuitous full frontal nudity (on the gals only - the guys wear pants). It's also fun seeing one of Hayes' fellow directors, Ted Roter, take a spot as the sleazy villain of the piece and hold his own. The shootout finale was also surprisingly and refreshingly bloody (Early squib work! Cool!). The lesser of these two movies, Sweet Trash manages to be strangely compelling and atmospheric, and days after seeing it I was still digesting it. I personally find that's usually the sign of an important movie, or at the very least, a polarizing one.
No, I won't serve your computer overlords! Hope you like getting shotgunned in the face, mob-dudes!
Released that same year, John Hayes begins The Hangup (1970) in a transvestite bar with a nautical theme, a unique campy location that grabs your attention right out of the starting gate. The overtly outre clientele of this colorful Los Angeles bar collect to watch a truly head-turning, orgasmic performance from vintage adult magazine centerfold and sexploitation starlet, Bambi Allen. An early adopter of breast implants, Bambi would -- like many of the silicone-injected guinea pigs of the very flawed cosmetic procedure -- be killed by complications directly related to her hard, awkward-looking chest augmentation.
Pan over to the two most unconvincing cross-dressers in the room, and sure enough -- they are undercover LAPD vice detectives, who are of course, in high demand amongst the eligible horny bachelors in the room. After jetting back to a skeezy motel and revealing that it's a bust, the lead vice cop, Robert Walsh (Clover Films regular, Tony Vorno, who also starred in Help Wanted Female) angrily head-butts one of the friendly Johns into submission.
We're here for a good time, not a long time.
"I spit on scum... I'm a cop!", Walsh will later bark at his partner (Eric Stern) as they take off their make-up."It's bad enough these weirdos run free in this town without having to impersonate them!"
After a weary day smashing heads and putting the fear of god into sexual deviants residing in the city of Angels, Walsh trudges home to his dinky rooming house flat, where he whines to his buxom redhead landlady, Miss Howard about all the clowns that make his existence so trying. "I catch queers!”, he explains as if he wished the whole world would just explode. “I catch Homosexuals, transvestites, child molesters, pimps, pushers, whores..."
Seemingly wooed by his homophobia, grated nerves and lack of patience for anything other than 1950s suburban values, she takes it upon herself to try to bed him. He's obviously hesitant, but the flesh is weak, and after some skillfully staged scenes of awkward enticement, an avocado-green bathroom tryst with Miss Howard takes place as he grinds against her on the filthy floor next to her toilet. Soon disgusted with the entire scene, he gets up, leaves her there to writhe, and goes back to his room where he rubs one out awkwardly while standing in a closet doorway. It was at this point that I fell in love with this bitter, bitter movie.
Beer is the only thing that makes sense anymore.
The next evening he's off to another den of debauchery to usher some more perverts into jail cells. This time he straps on his leathers and roars his motor bike on over to a costume party orgy at a fancy whorehouse mansion out in the country. With a cult vibe in full effect, consider this part of the movie a sort of welfare Eyes Wide Shut. Taken into a back room for extreme humpy-pumpy, Walsh meets our lead actress, a young prostitute runaway from Salinas named Laurie (Sharon Matt). Despite clearly being there to bring in the whores and pimps he despises so much, after a quiet, meaningful bedside conversation with the wide-eyed and innocent Laurie, Walsh has a sudden change of heart.
"I don't know why I'm doin' this!" the LAPD vice officer hisses, not just at her, but at himself as he shakes his head and escorts her out a back door, just as the police raid of the palatial bawdy house goes into full effect. With nowhere else to take her, he escorts the girl back to his smelly, dumpy bachelor apartment and begins calling her 'Angel'. Laurie does her bit to make herself useful (she's concerned about his seeming inability to do household chores) and being a child of the sexual revolution, she does that while mostly naked. The two of them seem much like father and daughter (both in age discrepancy and attitude) throughout most of their interactions, but fascinatingly also quickly start acting like a married couple. And before long that includes the... um, more intimate elements of marriage as well. (Slide whistle sound FX)
In his seminal 2007 hardcover tome dedicated to the wildest vintage american exploitation features, Nightmare USA, author Stephen Thrower wonders openly if screenwriter Paul Schrader may have been highly inspired by a viewing of The Hang Up. “The similarities to Taxi Driver are uncanny”, Thrower writes. “Walsh's lines about hatred of perversion are a virtual ringer for Travis Bickle's musings, and when Walsh decides to rescue Angel from the imminent vice-bust because he believes she's an innocent in need of his protection, we see the relationship between Travis and Iris in nascent form.”
Just a middle aged vice cop and his teenage fuck-buddy. Nothing more to see here. Move along.
Like Bickle, Walsh is the epitome of a damaged, conflicted character. He makes efforts to identify with the fresh-faced girl, such as when he buys a giant bag of celery -- "Organic stuff" he gruffly calls it -- but then he weirdly eats the stalks like he's eating a cob of corn, seemingly never having put a green vegetable in his mouth before. With nothing but contempt the younger generation, sexual deviancy and his own urges, he has trouble coming to terms with any of it. Walsh feels morally in the right for rescuing a teenage runaway from the streets, but knows he's stepped far over the line by taking her on as his live-in lover rather than placing her in protective custody or getting her back home. He's in over his head.
He can't seem to help himself, though, and we witness him -- via the power of pussy -- shed his skin. At work is one thing, but in private the hardened debauchery-hating urban vice cop melts away, replaced by a free spirit who likes going out into the country with his supple, pink-nippled flower child. Transformed, he literally frolics through open pastures with her before settling down to boff on a picnic blanket amongst other naked 20-something back-to-nature orgyists. Considering that Walsh looks like an angrier Mr Howl from Gilligan's island crossed with Glenn Ford, this is not just a cop going outside his comfort zone with a forbidden affair, this is a motherfuckin' mid-life crisis dialed up to 11.
With his life turned upside down, Walsh is utterly unprepared for what happens next. In a great twist that I didn't see coming at all, the beautiful young prostitute is revealed to have a secret that will change everything. It's a revelation that will usher the Walsh character even further down his spiral of destruction and the movie into what the dvd packaging aptly describes as “a powerful indictment of law-enforcement hypocrisy” and “a creative commentary on the sexual revolution and human nature.” Sure it was made quickly and on a tight budget, but this is bold, solidly-paced, impressive auteur shit, man. This is what film noir would have been like in the 1940s if they were allowed to have nudity and overt sexual situations. This is John Hayes bringing his 'A' game.
Speaking of overt sexuality, it's worth noting that the trailer for the movie included on the dvd has full frontal beaver shots that never appear in the movie, with some scenes in the preview clearly restaged with the actors now unclothed. Wondering if perhaps a different, harder, version of the movie is out there somewhere, I contacted Vinegar Syndrome's Joe Rubin, who explained that the beautiful print on their dvd came directly from the original camera negative for The Hangup. “Hotter outtakes would be used in the trailer to sell the film”, Rubin noted. “That was common. Harry Novak did that a lot too.”