Robert Frank, the Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker, was six years shy of a hundred when he died, in 2019. He left Europe for the U.S. in 1947, and in 1959, his groundbreaking book of photographs, The Americans, was published. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank had traveled the country catching images that were the visual counterparts of Beat poetry, then at its cultural apex. That same year, he made his first film, Pull My Daisy, co-directed with Alfred Leslie and featuring the writings of Jack Kerouac. Frank’s fixation on la vie de bohème evolved, and in 1972 he chronicled the Rolling Stones’ decadent Exile on Main St. tour. The film has never been commercially released, not least because the title is obscene.
One Frank film that is getting a revival this fall is Candy Mountain, his glorious 1987 road movie co-directed with and written by Rudy Wurlitzer. In a restored 2K print from Film Movement Plus, it opens this month in major cities, including screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on October 25, and will be digitally available on December 13.
Candy Mountain stars Kevin J. O’Connor as Julius, a struggling Lower East Side musician who is hired by a rock star (David Johansen) to track down Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin), a revered but mysterious maker of acoustic guitars. The quest takes the rudderless Julius from New York’s Bowery to Nova Scotia, with unexpected stops along the way: he sips whiskey with Silk’s golf-loving brother (Tom Waits) and is held captive by a guitar-strumming guy named Leon (Leon Redbone).
Featuring Dr. John, Rita MacNeil, Laurie Metcalf, and Joe Strummer, the film was little seen upon its initial release. Even Frank disowned it. He found the sound element of filmmaking cumbersome; taking pictures was his forte. Nevertheless, the film has a place within the canon of existential road movies such as Monte Hellman’s 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop (also written by Wurlitzer) and Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 Stranger than Paradise.
“I didn’t know who Robert was until he handed me a copy of The Americans,” O’Connor told me during a recent phone call from Chicago, where he lives. He was coming off his first credited screen role—a beatnik in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)—and he remembers that two months before production began he was at Frank’s apartment, where the photographer held court over friends and admirers that included William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jim Jarmusch. The room had the spirit of Pull My Daisy. “It was a school session for me, sitting there observing these eclectic artists and getting a sense of how I would play Julius.”
Initially, the rock impresario Bill Graham was Frank’s pick for the role of Julius, but Graham turned it down due to his hectic schedule. O’Connor’s earnestness, however, propelled the shoot along, and Wurlitzer encouraged the actors to improvise while Frank’s camera gracefully captured the humor and music of the moment. “During the shoot, it didn’t feel like I was acting,” he recalls. “I was more of a collaborator with Robert, Rudy, and all the artists I shared the screen with. They kept me on my toes.” Before filming ended, O’Connor had a real-life “Julius” experience. He was with Wurlitzer at Frank’s Cape Breton home, and “Rudy asked me if I wanted to bother Frank’s neighbor, Philip Glass. Soon enough, I heard Rudy knocking on the door. ‘Hey, Mozart! Let’s hang out!’ I really got along with those guys.”
Candy Mountain will be shown at BAM, in New York, from October 25 to October 31
David Stewart is a film writer and a professor at Emerson College and Plymouth State University
