Cinema: Hung Up

Synonon, a word derived from a junkie’s mispronunciation of seminar, is the name given to a self-help haven for drug addicts, founded seven years ago in California and now offering shelter and hope to 550 ex-addicts on both coasts. Filmed at Synanon House in Santa Monica, this tawdry little melodrama explains the method only sketchily, but exploits it at length.

Producer-Director Richard Quine and his scenarists shape the story as an obtuse triangle inclined toward a pert reformed prostitute (Stella Stevens), just the sort of girl to make two able-bodied ex-convicts (Chuck Connors and Alex Cord) change their habits. The dialogue is more square than daring.

“I want to go to bed with you,” says Cord.

“I’m saying yes, but I’m not doing yes,” Stella replies none too firmly. After a night together in a lifeguard’s shack on the beach, her doubts are even stronger: “We’re getting away with something in the bushes. It’s just like using dope, only we used each other.”

The romance is obviously doomed, despite group therapy and a volley of platitudes spouted by Eartha Kitt, Richard Conte and Edmond O’Brien, who with marginal success impersonate three real-life directors of Synanon House. Most of the time they appear to be running out-of-town auditions for Actors Studio. The movie’s vacuous approach to a heartbreakingly grim subject is underscored by the presence in the film of bona fide former addicts, asked to do nothing whatever that might keep a misguided movie from going to pot.