Underground film merged celebrity fantasy with real political newsreel footage

Evidence

The narrative is structured around two tableaux, similar but more confrontationally crude than those in Flaming Creatures. In the first, the future presidential candidate, attended by a sleeping nurse, is abducted from his crib; in the second, which features a rented fog machine and a professional belly-dancer as well as the singer Tally Brown, baby Willkie is auctioned and perhaps sacrificed. This is followed by ecstatic footage of the real Willkie accepting his party’s nomination. Thus, Smith’s hothouse childhood fantasies merge with entropic, harshly lit glamour scenes wherein the garishly costumed hobnob with the brazenly nude. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1396