The Real Weegee

In 1965, Sherman Price filmed a "fake" autobiography of noted photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1981), and then juxtaposed a real documentary produced in 1987 with the fake one, to create this one hour guide to the mind and photography of Weegee. If we dismiss the premise of the film-which is pretty easy to do-that viewers can decide for themselves which of the two films represents the "real" Weegee, we're still left with a fairly unsavory film. The "fake" story which involves Weegee's efforts to track his love (a mannequin) around Europe, is both amateur to the extreme, and tiresomely sexist. Granted that the piece was filmed in the 60s, people nevertheless, by most accounts, still had brains, and there's zippola cerebral effort here. The other film is much more interesting-though somewhat tasteless in its jokes about murder victims-in that it displays some 100 of Weegee's photographs culled from his best-selling Naked City and Weegee's People. A sidenote to all this is that director Julien Temple (Earth Girls Are Easy) is currently filming a feature film about Weegee. One can only hope that it is not as openly juvenile as this lame production which offends both women and all people of sense in equal proportions. Not recommended. (Available from most distributors.)