Last Exit to Brooklyn. - movie reviews

National Review, July 9, 1990 by John Simon

Willing Victims

AQUARTER CENTURY ago, Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn was published to the roars of a succes de scandale. It concerned some desperately drifting lowlife characters in a 1952 Brooklyn where no tree was growing, only bleakness, violence, perversion, and, at best, a kind of crude horseplay, blue-collar bumptiousness classifiable as Rabelais redux.

I recall being put off by the book's very title, which seemed to pump exoticism into the commonplace: Last Train from Madrid, fine; but what does "last exit to Brooklyn" mean: that if you don't get off here, you may find yourself in the Coney Island amusement park? Meeting the author at a Y reading didn't help, either; he seemed too wispy to have experienced all this tough stuff. I didn't know about his running off to sea at 15, his tuberculosis, the ribs he had removed, the drug addiction only a jail stay could stop, and other such authenticating details from his past and future.

I tried to read the book, but I gave up discouraged in fairly short order. Now I cannot find a copy, and so cannot tell you how faithful the film version is; but the German-American collaboration--mostly German, which may account for its grittiness--is strong fare for strong stomachs.

What Desmond Nakano, the young Japanese-American screenwriter, and Uli Edel, the German director, have done is to weave together the six more or less discrete stories by using the sort of cross-cutting D.W. Griffith created for Intolerance. But making things easier here is the sameness of locale: a Brooklyn consisting of a diner, a bar, an overcrowded apartment, the gate to a steelworks closed because of a strike, and the union office across the way where strike policy is plotted. We also get glimpses of the shipyards, and an inkling of an unseen military installation beyond. The outdoor locations really are Brooklyn; shot by Stefan Czapsky around Red Hook at night, the look is harsh and true. Manhattan scenes, seemingly shot in Brooklyn, look less convincing.

The three main plot strands concern the shop steward Harry Black, the prostitute Tralala, and an Italian family. Harry is now the strike secretary, and has never had it so good, allowed as he is (he thinks) into the union cashbox at will. When a bunch of hoods, led by Vinnie, just out of jail, beats up some servicemen, nearly killing the one who came to Tralala's defense when Vinnie was yelling at her, Harry, having watched with delight what happened, corroborates all the hood's lies to the police. Harry hates his home life with a baby and love-hungry wife; when he makes love to her, it's more like a beating. On the other hand, he is strangely stirred up by Georgette, a transvestite chasing after Vinnie, whom Vinnie and his gang end up bloodily torturing.

Harry treats the hoods to beer at the union office, eventually even cabs them to Manhattan, where they head for a transvestite orgy, and Harry falls hard for Regina, a transvestite whore; Georgette, racing in a drugged stupor after Vinnie, is run over by a truck. The infatuated Harry gets back late to Brooklyn for a ferocious confrontation at the factory gates between trucked-in scabs and cops versus striking workers. Even though Harry fights valiantly in the pitched battle, his ariving there late and having made free with the union funds get him fired. Broke, he is rejected by Regina, too; when he tries, drunkenly, to pick up a young boy, Vinnie's hoods beat him to a pulp and suspend him from some girders, where he is left hanging like a caricature of Christ.

Tralala specializes in luring servicemen out of the crowded bar (this is the time of the Korean conflict,) leading them to an abondoned car, and preparing them, as she kneels before them, for oral sex; Vinnie and his hoods then sneak up from behind, clobber the soldier or sailor, roll him, and divide the spoils with Tralala. One night, for fun, they don't intervene, but watch her have to go through with the act. Furious, she takes off for Manhattan with a soldier--a major trip; he passes out, she rolls him and goes off with a young lieutenant soon to be shipped to Korea. though she almost robs him, too, they have some idyllic days together. Embarking, he hands her an envelope with (she hopes) money; instead, it's a love letter with plans for the future.

Disappointed by this and her failure to be able to steal another soldier from a fellow whore, as usual, by the count of ten, Tralala off her blouse, exposes "the greatest tits in the Western world," and invites everyone in the dive to ball her. Carried out to the same abandoned car, she at first exults in the rapes and maulings, but in the end barely survives. Spook, an adolescent who has loved her platonically, and who has promised her the first ride on the motorbike he's been saving up for, now seeks her on a pathetic, hand-me-down bike; he finds her, dragged out into the open beside the car, being belabored by the last ruffian. In a fury of love, Spook beats him off, only to collapse sobbing on Tralala's body. The girl recovers enough to put an arm around him and whisper, "Don't cry!" in the travesty of a Pieta.