Shot on location in New York City, the film centers on Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, a male hustler who drifts through a single day in Manhattan, navigating clients, lovers, and the emotional detachment required to survive on the margins. With its explicit treatment of sexuality, casual nudity, and unvarnished portrayal of urban life, Flesh helped redefine the boundaries between avant-garde cinema and mainstream cultural taboo at the end of the 1960s. The film signaled Morrissey's emergence as the dominant creative force behind Warhol's filmmaking, and Warhol superstars Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling both made their film debuts
Widely controversial and censored upon release, yet commercially successful, Flesh became one of Warhol's most influential films, establishing Dallesandro as an icon of queer and countercultural cinema and inaugurating a loose trilogy—followed by Trash (1970) and Heat (1972)—that brought the aesthetics of the New York underground into broader public view.
Plot
Set over the course of a single summer day in New York City, Flesh follows Joe (Joe Dallesandro), a handsome young male hustler living in New York City. Joe earns money by selling sex to both men and women, moving through a series of encounters that reveal the transactional and emotional detachment of his life. He lives with his girlfriend Geri (Geraldine Smith), who is pregnant and emotionally unstable. While Joe spends the day seeking clients to raise money for an abortion, Geri remains at home, interacting with friends and drifting between anxiety, boredom, and resentment.
Joe's encounters include clients and acquaintances from the city's underground milieu, among them Jackie (Jackie Curtis) and a wealthy female client portrayed by Candy Darling. These interactions underscore Joe's objectification and the casual intimacy of his world. By the end of the film, Joe returns home having secured the necessary money, but the emotional distance between him and Geri remains unresolved, leaving the characters suspended in a cycle of economic necessity and personal alienation.
By the time Paul Morrissey made Flesh, he had already made a dozen short, silent films in the early 1960s and several films alongside Andy Warhol, including My Hustler (1965) and Chelsea Girls (1966). Flesh marked his feature film debut.[1]
Warhol and Morrissey conceived Flesh while Warhol was convalescing following an attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas. John Schlesinger was filming Midnight Cowboy (1969), which featured a party scene with several members of Warhol's entourage, including Viva and Ultra Violet who, with Morrissey, shot a separate scene.[2] Warhol initially approved their participation but later resented what he perceived as a dilution of his own engagement with New York's underground scene.[3] "They were spending three million dollars of United Artists' money to make a story of a hustler, and it didn't seem realistic," Morrissey later recalled.[4] When Morrissey reported that Factory people had been used mostly as extras in Midnight Cowboy, Warhol proposed a challenge: "Why don't you go out and make a movie like that, and we could have it out before theirs? And you could use all the kids that they didn't bother to use."[4][5] This resulted in Flesh, which was based on Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro's experience as a male hustler.[2]
Flesh was filmed over six weekends in the summer of 1968.[4] Most of it was shot at the New York apartment of Warhol's business manager, Fred Hughes, with a scene shot at the Factory.[4][6] Morrissey used a 16mmAuricon camera favored by Warhol for his earlier films. This camera permitted the recording of sound directly onto the film and had a maximum run time of 33 minutes. This allowed for long improvised scenes. Morrissey often included the camera's flash frames and pops, which occur when starting and stopping the camera, as an aesthetic choice.
In a 1973 interview with Fusion magazine, Morrissey said of Flesh:
"In Flesh, the man at the end talks about the wound he’s got on his arm, that his flesh is scarred, and he’s going to pot and getting fat by not going to the gym. One girl wants an abortion- wants her flesh removed. Everyone is in a predicament relating to their flesh. Joe’s predicament is that his flesh is attractive. It was all very deliberate."[7]
Assisting Morrisey on Flesh was Jed Johnson, who had recently begun working at the Factory and would become Warhol's longtime partner.[8] Despite Morrissey being credited as the writer for the film, Johnson told After Dark in 1970 that the dialogue was improvised.[9] "A lot of people ask if we have a working script on our movies because the dialogue is so clever … what happens, as usual, is that Paul Morrissey gives a sentence to the actors and has them improvising on a topic while the camera is rolling," he said.[9]
Flesh was originally not well received in the US and the UK, but it garnered popularity in Germany–being among the top 5 grossing movies of 1970.[12][11]
In June 1970, Jimmy Vaughan arranged a deal with Constantin, one of the largest film distributors in West Germany, to book the film into mainstream cinemas throughout Germany where it was seen by three million people, becoming one of the top five moneymakers of 1970.[13][14]
UK censorship controversy
Flesh premiered in London at the Open Space Theatre on Tottenham Court Road on January 15, 1970.[12] British censor John Trevelyan was wary of issuing the film a cinema certificate but had suggested it to distributor Jimmy Vaughan for club screenings.[15] On February 3, 1970, following a complaint by a member of the public, authorities raided the Open Space Theatre because the film did not possess a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) certificate.[15] After a public protest, the BBFC passed Flesh with an uncut 'X' certificate on October 27, 1970.[15][16] The film reopened at the Nottingham Film Theatre in February 1971,[17][18] and the Chelsea Essoldo cinema in March 1971.[19][20]
Legacy
In his book Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel writes that the threadbare plot belies something "far deeper and funnier in Morrissey’s unsentimental, accepting attitude toward life, embodied by Joe Dallesandro’s brooding, disaffected performance".[21]
Over the years, the film has gained a cult following. An image of Joe Dallesandro in Flesh was used on the front cover of The Smiths, the debut LP by The Smiths released in 1984. [22]
Flesh ranks 478th on Empire's 2008 list of the 500 Greatest Movies of All Time,[23] and in 2007, The Guardian picked Flesh as one of its "1000 Movies to See Before You Die".[24] It holds an approval rating of 63% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 8 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10.[25]
Hofler, Robert (2014). Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange - How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos. New York: itbooks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN978-0-06-208834-5.
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