MIXED BLOOD is often genuinely, knowingly funny and, immediately afterward, so explicitly, nastily bloody that you might want to throw up… Moving out from the shadow of Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated on such seminal Pop films as CHELSEA GIRLS and NUDE RESTAURANT, Mr. Morrissey went on to write and direct a series of idiosyncratic works — including FLESH, TRASH, and HEAT — that are unmistakably his own, being a hybrid of Pop and commercial. MIXED BLOOD is very much in this early 70’s style. The surprise is that it hasn't dated, possibly because no one else has ever successfully done anything like it. —Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Rita la Punta (Marília Pêra), a Brazilian single mother living in New York’s Alphabet City, resides with her drug-dealing son Thiago (Richard Ulacia) and his gang of teenage delinquents. In an attempt to control the drug trade below 14th Street, Rita goes against the leader of a rival neighborhood gang, Juan the Bullet (Angel David), spurring a turf war. When Carol (Linda Kerridge), a friend of a drug lord known as The German (Ulrich Berr), expresses an interest in Thiago, things become even more complicated.

Written and directed by NYC art scene and exploitation cinema luminary Paul Morrissey, MIXED BLOOD is a characteristically grimy descent into urban malaise that is often punctuated by moments of gallows humor. Featuring an eclectic ensemble cast that includes Warhol superstar Geraldine Smith and the screen debut of John Leguizamo, MIXED BLOOD is an essential (if often overlooked) entry into the canon of independent films made on the streets of New York in the 1980s. Gartenberg Media is proud to present the new 4K digital restoration of Morrissey’s indelible crime comedy, produced by Cinématographe from its original camera negative.

Like GME’s accompanying Cinématographe release — 1965’s WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR? — MIXED BLOOD can be viewed as one of the “bookends” of the New Hollywood era. Whereas the independently-produced TEDDY BEAR predates the official start of New Hollywood by approximately two years — and forecasts its common themes of violence, sexuality, crime, and societal dysfunction — MIXED BLOOD, released in 1984 and also independently-produced, arrives two or three years after the de facto end of New Hollywood and contains many of those same themes and subject matters.

To understand the significance of MIXED BLOOD’s content, one must understand the cultural period that led up to it as well as the movements in American filmmaking that contextualize it. The mid-1960s through the 1970s were a pivotal chapter in American society, one characterized by widespread socio-cultural revolution — and dysfunction — which was reified in contemporary cinematic trends. As noted by eminent film critic Robin Wood in his book HOLLYWOOD: FROM VIETNAM TO REAGAN… AND BEYOND:

Although Classical Hollywood had already been dealt a series of death-blows, it might have taken a much longer time dying had it not been for the major eruptions in American culture from the mid-60s and into the ‘70s: overwhelmingly, of course, Vietnam… The obvious monstrousness of the war definitively undermined the credibility of “the system”… yet this generalized crisis in ideological confidence never issued in revolution. No coherent social [or] economic program emerged… Society appeared to be in a state of advanced disintegration, yet there was no serious possibility of the emergence of a coherent and comprehensive alternative. This quandary can be felt to underlie most of the important American films of the late ‘60s and ‘70s… accounting for their richness, their confusion, and their ultimate nihilism… The[se] films seem to crack open before our eyes.

MIXED BLOOD contains the fatalism, taboos, violence, and eclectic visual style of many NYC-set films from the 1960s and ‘70s that deal with similar subject matters (e.g., 1969’s MIDNIGHT COWBOY, 1971’s THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK, 1973’s SERPICO, 1975’s TAXI DRIVER). However, Morrissey complicates these subject matters by injecting them with black humor, thereby setting the film apart from many New Hollywood entries.

It is also worth noting that Morrissey was a key figure in Andy Warhol’s Factory scene of the 1960s, an artistic and social group that rubbed shoulders with practitioners of “New American Cinema” — namely such filmmakers as Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Shirley Clarke, and Jack Smith. The New American Cinema Group (which formed The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, leading to the creation of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and eventually Anthology Film Archives), noted in their founding 1962 manifesto: “We don’t want rosy films. We want films the color of blood.” This radical ethos directly influenced the countercultural themes and unvarnished, experimental aesthetics that would come to define New Hollywood.

MIXED BLOOD embraces New Hollywood’s renegade spirit while also pushing New Hollywood taboos to their extremes. Reviewing Morrisey’s film for The New York Times, Vincent Canby noted the films “early ‘70s style” and identified its target audience as “jaded adults,” while dubbing it “a most unorthodox look at life in the drug trade on New York's Lower East Side… successively comic, brutal, primitive and sophisticated.” (Canby goes on to write about a scene in the film chronicling a gang shoot-out, “in which buckets of blood drench the screen… that the blood is movie-fake doesn't quite take the edge off the horror”). Meanwhile, Sid Smith of the Chicago Tribune noted, “MIXED BLOOD is a fairly successful neo-realist look at something most moviemakers wouldn't go near.”

By way of Morrisey and Warhol superstar Geraldine Smith, MIXED BLOOD has its roots in the New York underground — and epitomizes the gritty hallmarks of New Hollywood — while simultaneously signaling the end of this collective countercultural period in American filmmaking by proving to be an “outlier” among other, more palatable films being produced around the same time. The rise of Reagan administration and a widespread return to reactionary values in the United States in the 1980s signaled a broader cultural shift towards conservatism that trickled down into the movies. Studios became risk-averse, turning their attention towards uncontroversial and more commercially-minded filmmaking that traded gritty reality for escapism and spectacle. As observed by Robin Wood:

Vietnam ends, Watergate comes to seem an unfortunate abberration; the Carter administration, promising the sense of a decent and reassuring liberalism, makes possible a huge ideological sigh of relief in preparation for an era of recuperation and reaction… ROCKY and STAR WARS—the two seminal works of….”Reaganite entertainment”—appear a few years before Reagan’s election, and are instant, overwhelming commercial successes… [These types of films] diminish, defuse, and render safe all the major radical movements that gained so much impetus, became so threatening, in the ‘70s: radical feminism, black militancy, gay liberation, the assault on patriarchy… they are so insistently not serious, so knowing about their own escapist fantasy/pure entertainment nature, and they consistently invite the audience’s complicity in this.

Ironically, the United States’ return to conservatism in the 1980s — both politically and in the movies — mirrors Morrissey’s retreat into conservatism in his personal life. Despite the sympathetic portrayals of drug addicts and street hustlers in his films (like MIXED BLOOD), his station in New York’s 1960s underground, and his close collaboration with Andy Warhol, Morrissey was, to quote Bright Lights Film Journal, “a contradiction… a straight, right-wing Catholic Republican.”

In turn, MIXED BLOOD perfectly encapsulates the circumstances and contradictions that surround its creation: a gritty, independently-produced dark comedy, released in the midst of Reagan-era conservatism and therefore at the end of New Hollywood, a period in American cinema influenced by New York’s 1960s avant-garde film scene, of which its director — a reactionary, right-wing Catholic — was an integral figure.

This 4K restoration of MIXED BLOOD is accompanied by a supplemental booklet, featuring film stills, archival materials from the Paul Morrissey Film Trust, and new essays by culture writer Madelyn Sutton, film historian Erica Schultz, and American experimental film expert Paul Attard.

About Cinématographe

Taking its name from the Lumière Brothers invention of the same name, Cinématographe is a new sub-label from Vinegar Syndrome that seeks to fill gaps in the canon of American cinema. Offering a mix of auteur driven studio films produced during the New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and ‘70s, all the way through the indie boom of the 1980s and ‘90s, Cinématographe will explore the wide breadth of American moviemaking, spanning numerous genres and scales of production.

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MIXED BLOOD (United States, 1984, Paul Morrisey)

About Cinématographe

MIXED BLOOD
(United States, 1984)

GME Streamline Blog

About Cinématographe

MIXED BLOOD(United States, 1984)

MIXED BLOOD
(United States, 1984)