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[5.4.06] [Andrew Gallix]
HELL WILL BE OUR FINAL REWARD
 Living legend Richard Hell will read from Godlike, his latest novel, as well as other works, at the Cinematheque francaise on Friday 7 April (7.30pm, Salle Georges Franju, 51, rue de Bercy
75012 Paris) before presenting a rare screening of Final Reward, Rachid Kerdouche's 1978 underground film noir starring Mr Hell himself and featuring other downtown stars like Cookie Mueller, Terri Toye, Bill Rice, John Sex, and Geoffrey Carey. This is how the film is described on Richard Hell's website:
"The movie is a compendium of noir heist tropes set among underground punk, fashion/nightclub, and theater stars of that time. Richard has the lead role, playing the former 'king' of the scene returned from jail to find his woman (Cookie Mueller) now living with 'Sam' (Terri Toye). Cookie Mueller, of course, was in real life the fabulous writer and actress (John Waters got her to try to have sex with a chicken in Pink Flamingos) who was a good friend of Hell's and one of the best things about this movie is the S and M scene they have. Terri Toye was a fashionable transgender (man to woman) nightclubber and sometime fashion model as well as subject of a famous series of sex pictures Nan Goldin took of her with Patrick Fox. In the movie she plays a man who's actually a woman (I think).
 Anyway, Richard ('Crash') reclaims Cookie from 'Sam,' and starts planning a big robbery with his old crew, mostly because he wants to help make them 'feel alive' again. The movie is a fascinating artifact rather than a conventionally 'good' movie. While it is creatively shot in dramatic black and white, every sentence of its script is inappriopriate in one way or another and as an actor Hell sometimes seems like a puppet corpse, like one of those dead frogs in science class you could get to kick a leg by passing an electric current through it. Still, Hell is scarily charismatic in it and no serious Hell fan or student of the era should be without this film. It also features John Heys, John Sex, Bill Rice, Geoffrey Carey, and Donna Death, and the abundant music is by Patti Smith's keyboardist of the time, Richard Sohl."
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