Review of The Connection

In junkie mythology there was a clear connection between heroin and jazz music,the long - discredited belief held by second rate players that if they shot up they would be as good as their heroes who,as it happens were brilliant improvisers long before they started using,and not the other way around as their emulators told themselves.For example,alto player Jackie Maclean,a follower of Charlie Parker,took H in an effort to play more like his hero despite Bird's active discouragement. In "The Connection" Mr MacLean blows fierce Parkerisms knowing full well that heroin in real life robbed him of articulation and logical musical thought. I remember when the play opened in London the musical press held up its hands in horror despite knowing that a goodly number of British modern jazzers were victims of a tragic and wasteful culture. "The Connection" could not be said to encourage drug taking any more than "Trainspotting" a generation or so later. Addicts have a squalid and meaningless existence in any recognisable sense of the term and this is well realised in the movie. Anyone who has taken any type of drug will know that time flows at a different rate from people on the planet earth,the mind becomes befuddled subject to the very occasional flash of amazing clarity and the actors convey this state of mind very accurately. The "film within a film" conceit distances the viewer from the pointlessness and boredom of the average junkie's life and it can be viewed with rather more detachment than might otherwise have been the case. The actors are acting at "acting" until they get used to the presence of the camera when they revert to concentrating on their sole purpose in life,waiting for The Man. "The Connection" is a fine portrayal of life outside the mainstream of American society in all its sordid bleakness.Here there is none of the artificial glamour of "designer drugs",these are people living on the verge of oblivion,not models and pop - stars,rich and smug with the knowledge that they are above the law. When you're at the bottom in this movie,the only way is down.