Get Off My Back! (1965)

When Columbia Pictures made a commercial for a cult.

Get Off My Back! (AKA Synanon) (1965)
Directed by Richard Quine
Written by Ian Bernard, S. Lee Pogostin (screenplay), Charles Dederich, Sr. (idea), Barry Oringer, S. Lee Pogostin (story)

We open on a beach at night, where two guys in suits are staggering across the sand. Weirdly, a jazz piano plays a minor key version of the Batman TV theme, except this is 1965 and that doesn’t exist yet. The mystery is solved when the credits begin and we note the score is by Neal Hefti, who the following year would go on to write the music for Batman. (And sure, that sounds lazy, but if you’d composed something as cool and memorable as that Da-da-da-da riff, you wouldn’t want to see it go down with this leaky ass ship either.)

The two guys pass Synanon House, where an overheard voice explains how “at three months you get what we call the 90-day hump”, which I guess is a version of “90 Day Fiancé” for people who are afraid of commitment. But our two natty dudes are not interested in working three months for a one night stand, and they wander out onto the Santa Monica Pier. One of them collapses on a bench and sweats, while the other perches on the back and rhapsodizes about the Merry-go-Round and how he would ride that thing if he had a quarter. Thanks to a wide shot we can finally see who these guys are. The sweaty one is a young Alex Cord, who was basically the first draft of Lee Horsely, the other one is an annoying New York Method actor, Alex’s close friend, to whom he gives his last quarter so he’ll go away. While young Actors Studio is riding the carrousel, Alex sensitively portrays heroin withdrawal, which, in the tradition of diarrhea, is like a storm raging inside you.

Meanwhile, there’s an open house at Synanon, where parents can talk to the teachers about how Little Bobby’s D.T.s are going, and when he might stop projectile vomiting, and hallucinating that he’s turned into a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. A couple of squares are chatting about how hopheads can’t hide their shifty eyes—one of the squares is that stiff who played the chief Romulan lackey in the Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror”. The other square says the speech, by founder Chuck Dederich, should be interesting, and he heard Dederich “might be going to jail over some zoning issue”. Yeah. About that. He’s going to jail alright, but maybe not in this movie and definitely not for a zoning infraction.

Dederich, played in full Grumpy Old Man mode by Edmond O’Brien, tells the audience that alcoholics get a lot of love, but nobody did anything about dope addicts, so he did. “A hundred and forty people who couldn’t live without dope are living here, and they’re living here without any crutches. We drink coffee and we smoke cigarettes. We drink a helluva lotta coffee and we smoke a helluva lotta cigarettes but WE DON’T. SHOOT. DOPE!” (That is until we get cancer from all the coffee and tobacco and they have to put us on a morphine drip in the hospice.) Instead of dope, they “live on talk”. This is a reference to The Synanon Game, which was a form of therapy in which someone talks about himself, and is then verbally and sometimes physically abused by the rest of the group, including the therapist (we had the same thing in my house, but we called it “Sunday dinner”).

Dederich introduces “Betty” (Eartha Kitt), who’s the dean of woman at Synanon. She smokes and talks about her former life as a swinger and prostitute, and how she was dead when she first walked into Synanon, but her hatred saved her.  So I guess Synanon works on the same principle as the Sith—your hate will make you strong. But you have to smoke a lot of cigarettes to maintain it, so eventually you’ll wheeze like Darth Vader.

After Eartha kills with her 50 Great Monologues for Young Actresses, we’re treated to jazz music by the Synanon Quartet—four husky white guys in horn-rimmed specs. So in addition to curing dope fiends, Synanon is also involved in secretly cloning Dave Brubeck.

Alex Cord, still sweaty, staggers into Synanon and introduces himself. “I’m a hype” he says to the receptionist, played by Barbara Luna, who was Lt. Marlena Moreau (the “Captain’s woman”) in the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of Star Trek. She takes a drag on her coffin nail, and basically invites him to haul his needle-tracked ass inside and join the hate and the screaming.

Cut to the living room, where Alex sweats and writhes on the couch while Richard Conte and Stella Stevens watch his DTs like two people killing time with one of the lesser episodes of She’s the Sheriff. Stella asks if Alex (whose character name is “Zanky”, but I refuse to call him that and you can’t make me) would like to hear a song to relieve his torment. He sensibly demurs, but she persists, and starts singing “Put your little foot, put your little foot, put your little foot right out”, and he looks at her as if he’s yearning to do that very thing—through her face!

The next day, Chuck Connors is sitting on the beach, snapping at the other dope fiends for feeling good about being clean three weeks when he’s been clean for five years, and still doesn’t feel like whistling. Then Richard Conte comes out and pulls rank on Chuck, saying, “I shot dope for SEVENTEEN YEARS!”. Chuck snaps that today is the five year anniversary of his wife’s death. She croaked at the tender age of 20, and Chuck got the news in prison. I haven’t personally gone through a 12-step program, but I never realized it involved so much arch one-upmanship.

Alex wakes up after two days and three fabulous, fun-filled nights on the couch. He’s sweaty, stinky, and in the mood for some breakfast heroin, but like the Egg McMuffin, they stop serving it after 11, so he settles for a cigarette and a peanut butter sandwich. In the dining room, Alex makes flirty eye contact with Chuck, who looks highly disturbed, deeply confused, and possibly horny.

It turns out Chuck was Alex’s cellmate in prison, so suddenly the sexual tension makes sense.

Later, Dederich, Richard, and Eartha give Alex his “indoctrination”, which involves insulting him and shaving off his mustache, then Richard puts him on KP duty. He and Chuck Connors get into it, and we discover that when they were in prison, Chuck hid some heroin in Alex’s cell, and he got a year added on to his sentence. Chuck fears he wants revenge, and I desperately hope he’s right, because so far this has all been very dull.

Alex tries to liven things up by propositioning Stella, who says “Thank you,” like he just refilled her ice tea. He sees she doesn’t understand, and helpfully elaborates. “I’m a great lover,” he says. “And you’re a chick. You smell like a chick.” Now I know it doesn’t sound like it, but that’s actually a compliment—unless it’s said to a woman standing next to a henhouse, in which case it becomes a bit more ambiguous. “I bet you even taste like a chick,” he adds, then rubs her lips with his fingers like he’s trying to wipe off a big glob of Roquefort dressing. But she’s saved by the PA system, which calls her and Alex and a bunch of other junkies to “a Synanon”, which is like a hootenanny, except everybody sits in a circle and mocks Stella’s love for her child and ritually humiliates her for having whored to support her habit.

And while this is all unpleasant to watch, it’s surprisingly true to life. Synanon was based on these shaming sessions, where dope addicts made alternately abusive and sarcastic remarks about each other in the name of Love. But I didn’t expect to see it in the movie, so…score one for verisimilitude.

Chuck sulks in the Barber Shop and Eartha comes down to verbally abuse him about how he doesn’t make it with any chicks because of his dead wife. Chuck politely declines, explaining that “every chick in this place is a whore”, while his wife was only a junkie and a corpse.

A week later Alex declares he’s kicked the habit and joined the Unhooked Generation and would really like to bone now, please, but Stella has to go pick up her son. Then she and Barbara Luna take him to the Santa Monica Pier for hotdogs and Cokes, while a jazzy arrangement of “Put your little foot right out” contaminates the soundtrack. Then the boy changes into a swimsuit and they run down the beach where Chuck, resplendent in a tiny Speedo, picks up the half-naked kid and carries him around in a scene that was interrupted when my phone shrieked an Amber Alert.

Another week goes by, and Stella’s ex-husband shows up and says, “Hey, remember when I lent you our kid? You were supposed to return him…”  So the lesson of the film is: never loan your child to a junkie. Also, don’t loan your hedge clippers and Garden Weasel to the opium den next door. I learned that the hard way…

Watching her son being led away by his father, Stella looks at Alex and seems to think, “Screw ‘em. I’ll make another son!”, because she grabs him and says, “I want you.” Next thing you know, Alex has a blanket under his arm and they’re sneaking off to the darkened beach and into the empty lifeguard tower for some procreatin’, post-prison sex that does not involve Chuck Connors. A clear win for us.

They have an awkward post-coital conversation about love. Alex thinks she wants him to say he loves her because they just made love. She seems torn between pity and the urge to laugh in his face, but then it hits her, as he’s smooching the palm of her hand, that maybe he wants her to love him. She shrugs it off, saying, “We just got high…It’s the same as using dope, except we used each other.” If that’s the case, I now realize, even though I never used heroin, that I was apparently a huge dope fiend in my twenties.

The next morning, Chuck sees them doing the walk of shame across the sand and runs and tattles to Dederich, who forbids them to see each other, setting up a West Side Story-like modern take on Romeo and Juliet, but with fewer stag leaps and more horse.

Alex’s friend from the first scene shows up while Alex is taking out the trash. Alex corners him and demands his friend bring him a couple of caps. The next day he returns with Andy Capp and Al Capp, but Alex wanted heroin! So Young Mr. Method tries robbing a record store, but gets caught instantly. Back at Synanon, Alex decides to burgle his dormitory, but spies one of his fellow hypes—played by Bernie Hamilton, who later became the police captain on Starsky & Hutch— sneaking up to the roof. Bernie digs a bottle of cough syrup out of a downspout and guzzles it. Seeing another victim of addiction struggling with his human frailties, Alex demonstrates surprising empathy and sensitivity—I’m kidding, he points and brays like the total jackass he is. And then he blackmails Bernie and demands he bring him more Robitussin. Apparently losing his mustache made Alex evil, which is why my wife won’t let me shave mine.

He gets worse. That night in the living room, Alex watches Chuck try to convince Stella that the tropical fish in the aquarium are all junkies. Then he goes over to the hi-fi and takes off the record that’s playing. Alejandro Rey, who was the playboy casino owner in The Flying Nun, objects that he was listening to that, and Alex mocks his accent. Honestly, I liked this guy a lot better when he was strung out and moist.

Bernie goes to Dederich and confesses, ratting out Alex at the same time. Cut to the trash dumpster where Alex sits topless on a wall, waiting for his connection. Chuck says Dederich wants to see him, and suddenly the soundtrack coughs up a slow, sexy jazz tune that makes it sound like a stripper is about to appear. Sadly, no. Alex rants about how he’s going to leave and take Stella with him, while Chuck begs him to stay. It’s an ugly, emotional scene, and I have to wonder why I ever shipped these two.

Alex starts screaming, “Fight me for her!” and slapping Chuck. But Chuck is a changed man, he’s no longer the animal he was in prison, and has foresworn all violence. But he makes an exception, kicks the crap out of Alex and throws him over the wall to the street. Then, under the shocked looks of Richard Conte and the other junkies, Chuck does his own walk of shame back into Synanon House. What a lucky break for this fragile community when Alex staggered in and passed out on the couch for three days. He’s made a real difference in their lives.

Eartha finds Stella packing, planning to run off and find Alex. This is clearly a stupid idea, and Eartha fights back the only way she knows how: by monologuing. It doesn’t work, and Stella checks into the nearest flophouse. The next day, Chuck, some other guy, and the dude from The Flying Nun all graduate from Synanon and leave to start their new lives, which Richard Conte assures them will be grim and miserable. Meanwhile, Stella takes to hanging out at Zanzibar, a dive Alex always used to go on about.

The next day, Dederich is off to jail for reasons the film is cagey about, and everyone at Synanon feels so bad about it they all chip in to get him a box of Kleenex.

That night, Alex and Young Method Man are drunk in Zanzibar, when Stella walks in. She tells him how worried she’s been, and he invites her to his flophouse, sweetening the death by manhandling her lips again.

In his SRO hotel, Alex—who’s growing his mustache back! Beware!—is cooking up a cap of heroin on a spoon over a candle. Now personally, I’d never cook for a girl on a first date. I’d take her to a nice restaurant and recommend she order off the Ala Carte Smack menu.

He loads up his works while singing “Put your little arm, put your little arm, put your little arm right out”, and offers the needle to Stella, but she says, “you first” and watches him shoot up. Meanwhile, Chuck finds Young Master Method in Zanzibar and coerces him into giving up Alex. Back at the shabby furnished room, Alex tells Stella, “I love you!” and “Have some heroin!” But sadly, the smack is not agreeing with him.

Chuck and Method Man arrive to find Alex dead. The same thing happened to Sid Vicious; he detoxed in jail and when he got out, unthinkingly shot his usual fix and promptly overdosed. Well…live and learn. Although not in this case.

Chuck drags Stella out. She says she wants to stay with Alex, take care of him, but at this point I’m not sure what she can do for him other than wave a magazine around to keep the flies off. Chuck says she has to go back to Synanon, but she’s a small business owner now, having turned her first trick last night to pay her rent. However, if he has a ten spot he can be her second trick, and then they can both get high. But he doesn’t have ten bucks so she runs off toward Palisades Park while a funky version of “Put your little foot” accompanies her poor decision-making.

Eventually Stella goes crawling back to Synanon, arriving during a group singalong to “We’re Poor Little Lambs Who Have Lost Our Way”.  It’s not a happy ending, but it does make a hard-hitting, realistic point to the audience. That once you take a bunch of dope fiends and clean them up, they have a chance—a slim chance—to live a normal life. But it won’t be easy, they’ll never again feel those highs they were addicted to, and their karaoke will always be depressing.

So what have we learned from this film? Well, a couple things. This represented the last gasp of the low-to-mid budget “problem picture,” which was a staple of both major studios looking for prestige Oscar bait and sleazy, fly-by-night exploitation producers looking for a quick buck from the horny and curious—and that had basically been the status quo since the dawn of film. From 1916’s Race Suicide and Where Are My Children?, about how birth control and abortion were decimating the white race, to the hilarious anti-marijuana films of the Thirties, like Marihuana and Reefer Madness, to classy post-War pictures like Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire that explored antisemitism, to the juvenile delinquent flicks in the Fifties, to the Sixties, where films began grappling with the emerging drug culture, even though all these Sixties junkies still talk like Fifties Beatniks.

So I find this movie mildly fascinating as a relic of a genre that soon after this abandoned the movie house and moved to television, where it slowly devolved into the Afterschool Special. But I also find it hilarious as a piece of wildly premature propaganda. The film ends with these words:

Chuck Dederich spent twenty-five days in jail…for violating a local zoning ordinance. Seven parolees, living drug-free in Synanon, were ordered out by the authorities — out on the streets.

But Chuck returned to build Synanon into a national movement. Today there are hundreds of people working and growing with Synanon—living, because of Synanon.

Columbia Pictures is grateful to Synanon for the opportunity to film this picture where it all began.

Okay then, let’s spread the good news of Synanon. Chuck definitely had some early success with his rehab facility, but it went to his head, and soon he was lording it over brainwashed disciples in private compounds, separating married couples, forcing the men to undergo vasectomies, the pregnant women to get abortions, and all the female members to shave their heads.

When George Lucas needed a lot of shaven-headed extras for his 1971 film THX-1138, he hired Church of Synanon members.

Dederich ran the whole cult playbook, from sexual abuse to violence (anyone attempting to leave the group would be declared a “Splittee” and beaten severely). Eventually, he ordered two of his junkie flunkies to cut the rattle off a Diamondback and leave it in the mailbox of a lawyer representing several ex-members. The victim spend a week in the hospital, but survived, while Chuck was convicted of attempted murder.

So in the end, I guess this is what I learned: that between all the cults (Synanon, EST, the People’s Temple), and all the serial killers (the Zebra murders, the Hillside Stranglers, the Zodiac killer), the Seventies was one weird time to grow up in California.

I’m not saying this explains me…I’m just sayin’.