Like an anteroom in hell, The Connection depicts the grim and languorous existence of an assortment of Greenwich Village druggies-jazz musicians and failed philosophers-caught in that irreducible eternity just before the dealer arrives. Director Shirley Clarke captures a sensational underground scene with the distanced cool of a Miles Davis composition: the highly inventive roving camera, some marvelous medicated acting, and a jazz score by Freddie Redd add up to a truly hip mise-en-scène. Clarke's first feature is also an incisive interrogation of filmic reality, brought to us by a filmmaker within the narrative who is making a documentary about addicts ("There's something dirty about just peeping into other people's lives..."). Fresh from its triumph at the Cannes Film Festival, The Connection was refused a licensing permit in New York on grounds that the use of the word "shit," slang for heroin, made the film obscene. The Connection rose victorious when the courts examined the use of the word, rather than the word itself, recognizing that "shit" happens.