Weekend Rental: Naked Lunch

Roy Scheider who died of myeloma complications at the age of seventy-five last Sunday, was undoubtedly one of the key players in the American 1970’s film revival.  He’ll be best known for his leading  roles in The French Connection, for which he was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor; Jaws–here he ad-libbed one of the most famous lines in cinema history: “You’re gonna’ need a bigger boat”; and All that Jazz, a role for which he received an Oscar nomination for best actor. These films are all excellent on many different levels, all classics, all unforgettable–and so for many of you it surely won’t be the first time viewing these works. For this reason, I suggest, for this weekend’s rental:

David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burrough’s novel, Naked Lunch, in which Mr. Scheider plays the menacing doctor and drug pusher, ‘Dr. Benway’ to Peter Weller’s William Lee (a pseudonym for Burroughs).  It is a film as twisted and dark yet satirical and absurdly humorous as one would expect from either Burroughs or Cronenberg and it effectively brings to life all those terrifying and delirious writings which Burroughs based on his own drug-induced paranoia and conception of a socially and politically warped America.