Cry Dr. Chicago (1971)
By George Manupelli
SEE STEVE PAXTON tongue-kiss a frog in George Manupelli’s Cry Dr. Chicago (1971), See Paxton’s extended death scene in which he staggers through the grass, an arrow piercing his heart, before falling face first in a stream. It’s as bravura an example of giving up the ghost as Laurence Olivier’s famed swan dive at the end of Hamlet (1948), except that Paxton is poised on the tipping point of satire. Deadpan satire, of course. Paxton aside, there’s nothing sufficiently alluring about Cry Dr. Chicago to separate anyone from their Twitter feed on election night. Newly preserved by Anthology and programmed as part of the Judson Dance Theater’s fiftieth anniversary, it seems as lugubrious and sophomoric as it did four decades ago. That said, the movie is not without historic interest, primarily as documentation of members of the art collective, the ONCE Group who collaborated with Manupelli on what was in fact a Dr. Chicago feature film trilogy, Cry Dr. Chicago being the third and the only one shot in color. (The films are available on DVD individually and as a boxed set. Paxton fans take note: He is equally fascinating in all three, looking like a combination of a small-town college…
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