Cinema: Passion in the Pigsty

Futz loves his pig. That isn’t graffiti; it’s a plot. Futz is an Appalachian farmer whose great pleasure in life is making love to a porker named Amanda. Naturally, his narrow-minded neighbors are upset. The village slut plots revenge on Farmer Futz after he invites Amanda along on a tryst. She persuades a local homicidal maniac to claim that he killed a village girl only after seeing Futz and Amanda in the throes of passion. That’s grounds right there for the sheriff to grab Futz and toss him into jail, where the indignant citizenry will eventually seize him and ruthlessly murder him.

“It’s about personal freedom,” soberly explains Director Tom O’Horgan, a chichi con artist from off-off-Broadway. “It’s about the responsibility of freedom.” Futi might also just as well be a propaganda film for the anti-Anti-Vivisection Society, a moving plea for the tolerance of sodomists, or a fearless indictment of soil erosion. It makes no difference, and neither, really, does the movie. Based on Rochelle Owens’ play and enacted by a group of wildly undisciplined shock troops who call themselves the La Mama Repertory Troupe,* Futz is merely a piece of fraudulent and fearsomely noisy theater of outrage. O’Horgan ceaselessly has his actresses jumping up and entwining their legs around any available male waist; and his notion of “new cinema” is to photograph scenes of idyllic love in slow motion and scenes of bestial passion through a red filter. Such effects make Futz about as avant-garde as a Head & Shoulders commercial.

* Which got its start at the Cafe La Mama, a sometime fertile training ground in Greenwich Village for theatrical experimentation.