Videodrome :: Candy Mountain, A ROBERT FRANK Roadtrip movie - AQUARIUM DRUNKARD

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Robert Frank

In 2019, Robert Frank died in Nova Scotia, Canada at the age of 94. He was, without a doubt, one of the greatest photographers to ever turn his eye on America. In the 1950s, the Swiss-born Jewish twenty-something criss-crossed the country taking pictures always and everywhere. His efforts resulted in a landmark book The Americans, published in 1958. As Jack Kerouac wrote in his introduction to the book, Frank “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film…”

 . . . . . all these years later, when hardly anyone would bat an eye at footage of a young Mick Jagger hoovering cocaine, viewing C**ksucker Blues as it was meant to be seen is still a rare event. One of the more high profile screenings happened in Boston in 1988, when Robert Frank hosted a double feature that paired C**ksucker Blues with what would turn out to be his final feature film, Candy Mountain.

Candy Mountain is in many ways a strange film, but it makes perfect sense in the context of Robert Frank’s life. Perhaps the strangest thing about the movie is that it was made in 1987, and not ten or twenty years earlier.

Candy Mountain - Robert Frank : a road trip - Aquarium Drunkard article here

(Welcome to Videodrome. A recurring column plumbing the depths of vintage and contemporary cinema – from cult, exploitation, trash and grindhouse to sci-fi, horror, noir, documentary and beyond.)