I lived on 73rd Street, just west of the Ansonia Hotel about eight years after this movie was released, but the neighborhood hadn't changed that much. You could still find discarded needles in the tired dirt of Sherman Square and the triangle at the south end of the IRT station, and the Ansonia was still a Single-Room-Occupancy hotel in which old men in cheap hats sat on tired furniture in the water-wrecked lobby. The remnants of the Silver Fox District held out on Riverside Drive and the Schwab House, and my landlord was trying to rehab the building piecemeal, but it would be another decade before the G.D. Yuppies recolonized the area.
Nowadays you wouldn't recognize the place, but when I was there, it looked just like it does in the movie. I didn't pay much attention. The entire City was bottoming. Now, almost 50 years later, the movie looks almost quaint in its depiction of two junkies destroying themselves. The screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and a first starring role (his second screen appearance) by Al Pacino, along with approval by Cannes, made it seem hip and cool, like TRAINSPOTTING did a quarter of a century later. To me, it feels more like REEFER MADNESS.
Nowadays you wouldn't recognize the place, but when I was there, it looked just like it does in the movie. I didn't pay much attention. The entire City was bottoming. Now, almost 50 years later, the movie looks almost quaint in its depiction of two junkies destroying themselves. The screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and a first starring role (his second screen appearance) by Al Pacino, along with approval by Cannes, made it seem hip and cool, like TRAINSPOTTING did a quarter of a century later. To me, it feels more like REEFER MADNESS.