Dusty and Sweets McGee (1971)

Director: Floyd Mutrux
Writer: Floyd Mutrux
Stars: Clifton Tip Fredell, Kit Ryder, Billy Gray

In the alternative Hollywood of 1970s, director Floyd Mutrux got the green light to produce a film about young drug addicts. Eager to tap into the youth market, and without a clue of how to do it, studio head honchos signed off on the film despite it having no viable script. It was instead based on some interviews with actual drug addicts.

Dusty and Sweets McGee follows the two young addicts of the title as they idly spend their days in early 1970s Los Angeles. The camera rolls as the addicts roam the streets of LA from downtown to the beach. Car radios play the hits of the day as they aimlessly go about their drug-addicted lives. Eating hot dogs at Pink's, committing petty crime, scoring drugs and cruising the sunset strip are lovingly documented by Mutrux.

There is no plot, but what evolves is a portrait of lost, young souls adrift in failed consumer society. Affluent America is all around them, shiny and sun-drenched like a beautiful California orange, but there is something rotten at the core of this fruit. Vietnam rages on, the Watts riots were still smoldering in people's minds to the South as the big, shiny convertibles rolled majestically down the endless freeways. Many neo-realist films indict society for failing to provide for its citizens economically; Dusty and Sweets McGee seems to point a finger at spiritual deficit.

Dusty and Sweets McGee is a plotless, episodic look at the days and nights of Los Angeles junkies circa 1971. This mournful, elegiac film is a truly unique entry in its genre, its cast of real life hopheads lending it a bittersweet tinge offset by a marvelous soundtrack of jaunty oldies. Blue Moon, Duke of Earl, The Loco-Motion…these were the songs these young people grew up listening to in happier, simpler times, and now they're the soundtrack of their rapidly disintegrating lives. There's even a perfectly selected Van Morrison tune, Into the Mystic, and a magnificent composition by the unfairly neglected Jake Holmes. The first and best film of director Floyd Mutrux's on again off again Hollywood career, Dusty and Sweets McGee is an amazing time capsule that all serious film fans should try to see.

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