Underground movement director and screenwriter Joseph Strick (1923-2010) like Lionel Rogosin (Come Back Africa, 1959) was a relative veteran. Strick was a US Army cameraman during the second World War and by 1948 co-directed a highly influential short titled Muscle Beach, collaborating with Irving Lerner. Following a spell on television, he joined fellow documentarians Sidney Meyers and Ben Maddow to independently produce and direct 1959's The Savage Eye. This semi-documentary odyssey through the more sensational, seedy and saddening aspect of American life, as undertaken by a young divorcee (Barbara Blaxey) was chastised for its cheap cynicism, and condescension.
Strick's career thereafter consisted chiefly of adaptations from the decidedly more risque products of the literary Avant-garde. An interpretation of Jean Genet's The Balcony (1963) was followed up by censor-baiting attempts to transpose controversial novels from authors James Joyce and Henry Miller, but the resultant flurries around the films of Ulysses (1967) and 1969's Tropic of Cancer had its focal point on morals in lieu of movies.
 |
| Strick Re-Joyces with Ulysses (1967) |
Some of the director's tarnished radical credibility was restored by the harrowing short Interviews With My Lai Veterans (1970), shot in the aftermath of the infamous Vietnam War massacre, but after his contribution to the Seventies road-movie cycle with the aptly titled Road Movie (1974) was a commercial flop that left audiences underwhelmed, he would again retreat to the modern classics library for a diluted adaptation of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1977.
Above : Director Joseph Strick's nine-minute short Muscle Beach (1948)