Amazon.com Customer Reviews
Rated 4 out of 5 SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL The movie as well as the hunk are beautiful! I fell in love with Joe as soon as I saw his body that no other guy can compete with. The story is very good. Sensitive, fragile and desperate. We do not loose any minute with this film as Joe keep us under his spell all the way. Rated 3 out of 5 Joe Dallesandro Has A Magnificent Physique ........This is not a great film. It’’s interesting, however, and I’’m not sorry I ordered this DVD. As a New Yorker, it is always interesting to see the Big Apple back in the ’’70s or ’’60s. Seeing Joe walk up streets that I know so well makes this picture mean more to me. I’’ve seen the hustlers of 42nd Street and hookers jumping in and out of cars, I’’ve seen the sleaze of the City. That life-style was never fascinating to me. The sexual part was, but the lurid, impersonal part was not. After reading John Reichy’’s "City of Night," I was prepared to move from the midwest to Gotham with a wealth of knowlege. Believe me, as a young, attractive novice, I encountered much of what was in that book!Joe Dallesandro, with some acting lessons with Stella Adler or Uta Hagen might have made an exceptional actor. Many of the people who reviewed him, I think, were dazzled by his beauty and his incredible, natural body (he sports an incredible bush of pubic hair). How refreshing that is considering all the shaving of private parts these days! Any woman or man who looks at Joe cannot help but look at him without having the SAME admiration for him as they do for the au natural statue for Michelangelo’’s David. I remember when my body was similar to that! I don’’t recommend this picture for the "art" of it, but if you want to appreciate a modern depiction of the perfection of the male human form...Dallesandro is your model. Rated 4 out of 5 Body Pride We are at the end of the hippy revolution. Andy Warhol explores the body-pride of the young males. This new feeling finds its roots in the cult of the body, of physical strength and muscular building. We are before body-building but after Woodstock where the body was religiously considered as the mark of God on us. This body-pride is taken to the extreme of believing that a man has to live for his body but also by his body. His body is the only riches he naturally has and he must live from it. So he exploits his body and by doing so exploits the fantasms of other men and women, the fantasm that a beautiful body has to be worshipped and the body-pride can be without any guilt transmuted into sex. The main character exploits this vein and makes a comfortable living out of it. But Warhol goes one step further and transforms the nudity of the male body into something banal and in no way provocative. It is a beauty to be looked at and not to be ashamed of. He even gives a rare scene where the nude father plays with and feeds his little baby. That was a real revolution in those days. The father was more than a man. He was a father and as such could take care of the baby he had born to life, just as much as the mother. The film hence gives some very precious scenes on this cult of the male body as a source of beauty and pleasure. It is the total lack of shame and modesty that makes this nudity, complete or in the process of revealing itself by undressing, something normal, unshocking and revealing in us some kind of purity by the capability to look at it without being in anyway roused to some kind of carnal desire. « We are not queers » as one character says, just proud of our well trained and sculpted bodies.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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