Last exit to Brooklyn (D)

Hubert Selby Jr’s controversial novel is a beat classic. This stark expressionist film manages to do the novel justice, contributing a visually electric night-landscape of a community going to hell. It is Brooklyn 1952 and a six month factory strike has accelerated poverty and despair in the working-class white suburbs. “Last Exit to Brooklyn” reveals the hidden subcultures and tensions in poor American communities, a subject rarely addressed by Hollywood. The narrative whirlwinds around a trio of stories: Ricky Lake plays a young Italian girl who falls pregnant, to the distress of her Italo-American father. Stephen Lang is a union organiser, skirting corruption, whose attraction to men begins to dismantle the safe complacency of his masculinity as he encounters the underground homosexual world of the 1950s. Jennifer Jason Leigh delivers a tragically sublime performance as Tra-La-La, a beautiful young woman who is used, abused and exploited by a young gang of pimps. This is a dark, terrifying movie; shattering the myth of American equality. The final gang assault of Tra-La-La is one of the most violent, distressing scenes in cinema and the film was initially banned in Australia. Music by Mark Knopfler.