Walk on the Wild Side Movie Review

The BBC has always been fascinated by American pop iconography, and Walk on the Wild Side might easily qualify to be a segment on A&E's Biography series. This portrait of the drag queens in Andy Warhol's factory is chockful of clips about what went wrong and when and why. Many of Warhol's superstars are no longer around; did his films provide valuable documentation for losers who would have died anyway, without leaving a trace, or was there something about the starmaking process itself that sped up their destruction? Don't look for the answers here, although Joe Dallesandro's appearance at 45 lends validity to Howard Hawks’ assertion that real stars walk on the set thinking that everyone wants to lay them. Time has definitely been unkind to Trash’s once baby-faced star.

1993 40m/C GB D: James Marsh.