Jack O'Connell Movies

Filmmaker Jack O'Connell -- not to be confused with the similarly named actor of the 21st century -- was one of the more interesting directorial figures to emerge from New York City in the 1960s. He began his professional life as an advertising man in the 1950s, a denizen of New York's Madison Avenue; but he was bitten by the filmmaking bug and chucked that career to go to Italy, where he soon worked his way into the movie industry. O'Connell was fascinated by the neo-realist work of such figures as Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Federico Fellini and it was through Antonioni that he received his first screen credit, as a special assistant to the director on L'Avventura (1960) (in which he also played a small on-screen role). After returning to the United States, he made his directorial debut with the drama Greenwich Village Story. Strongly reminiscent of La bohème in its plot, the movie -- shot entirely on location in Greenwich Village -- was set amid a world of beats, poets, and NYU students, and amid an earnest (and beguiling) cast, led by Robert Hogan and Melinda Plank (aka, Melinda Cordell), one could spot future filmmakers James Frawley and John G. Avildsen as well as future television star Mel Stewart. The movie attracted some attention at the time and seemed to promise very good things from O'Connell, as did his next effort, the documentary Revolution (1968), shot among the hippies of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and featuring the music of the Steve Miller Band, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Mother Earth. Alas, a dispute with the union representing projectionists in New York City hobbled the movie's roll-out and, ironically enough, it was by the presence of the soundtrack LP in stores that most audiences ever knew of the film's existence. One person who did see the movie was Antonioni, who reportedly spotted Daria Halprin, a dancer who appeared in Revolution, whom the Italian director subsequently put into a co-starring role in his counter-culture drama Zabriskie Point (1970).
O'Connell's third film, Christa (1971), was a huge success in America, mostly owing to its subject matter and marketing. Shot in Denmark, it told the story of a young, free-loving airline flight attendant who has abandoned her husband and child, and depicted her various erotic and emotional adventures. Distributed in America by American International Pictures, it was re-titled Swedish Fly Girls -- Sweden somehow being a more marketable locale for American purveyors of erotica than Denmark -- and it became a huge money-maker in its time. In the years after, a series of personal and health difficulties thwarted O'Connell's efforts at further filmmaking, and even his efforts in the 1990s at remarketing Revolution ran into unexpected complications, when the owners of the 1985 feature film Revolution (starring Al Pacino, et al) threatened legal action over the use of the title, so he had to reissue it as The Hippie Revolution. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi