Deep Focus: Dusty and Sweets McGee and the Unsung Floyd Mutrux

[Editor's note: In a new weekly feature for Country Life, James Cathcart, DJ, cinephile and now programmer of Third Man Records' new Light and Sound Machine film series, shares finds from the dusky celluloid recesses and online frontiers of cinema.]

“The story of a solid gold weekend in LA,” as told through William Fraker’s hazy, drifting camerawork, as untethered as the lives it captures, Floyd Mutrux’s Dusty and Sweets McGee (1971) is not just one of the greatest portraits of addiction, but also one of the paramount examples of the limitless freedom and possibility of American cinema in the 1970s.

Shot on short ends for around $50,000, it’s an unflinching examination of the desperate underbelly of the era. It's wholly unconcerned with dramatic convention, and to say it’s the kind of film that could never be made today is an understatement — it was barely allowed to exist back then. Warner pulled it from theaters after a successful opening week, fearing condemnation for the nonjudgmental style with which it portrayed all-too-real instances of heroin use. It wasn’t enough that the drug is clearly painted as a destroyer of life: it’s as if Dusty presented truths too viscerally, too matter-of-factly for it to be considered anything but dangerous.

At times it feels as if the film primarily consists of B-roll, making collage of the sights and sensations of the era, while using a documentary element as the backbone of its thesis. Indeed, most of the addicts we meet along the way are exactly who they say they are — from the cautionary ex-con who’s returned from the dark side of hell, to the streetwalking male hustler confessing the experiences of “a young boy’s cock in America.”