The Connection

Shirley Clarke's legendary low-budget feature, completed in 1961 (and effectively suppressed by the censors), finally gets the release it deserves. The entire film unfolds in an oily-walled, bare-bulb junkies' tenement, where eight men are waiting for their fix. The dialogue, from Jack Gelber's play, has a late-'50s hepcat snarl, but Clarke, her camera moving with voyeuristic precision, recasts the material as a literal documentary in the making. She gets at the inner truth of addicts — that they're pining for transcendence in the void. A-