Forty Deuce

Director: Paul Morrissey

1982 / 89min / 35mm

Morrissey’s triumphant return to making movies in New York City was occasioned by a revelatory encounter with Alan Bowne’s off-Broadway morality play Forty-Deuce, a work written with a fine-tuned ear for street corner argot and an aching empathy for society’s rejects that found an ideal audience in the director of Trash. Morrissey faithfully adapted Bowne’s play about underage “hustlers” trying to turn the fatal overdose of one of their own into some quick cash, using most of Bowne’s original cast—including a fresh-faced Kevin Bacon—while introducing an astonishing, extended split-screen sequence to his staging, a refinement of Morrissey’s previous diptych work with Andy Warhol on Chelsea Girls, making his Forty Deuce a decidedly cinematic experience.

Please note: In order to present this program in its entirety, we had to combine two prints of varying quality.

35mm print courtesy of the Paul Morrissey Films Trust.

Distributor: Vinegar Syndrome

Introduction by filmmaker Michael M. Bilandic on Friday, September 12th