Before saying goodbye to the straightforward documentary film, Alex de Renzy swung hard with Weed, an epic, captivating, and thorough look at marijuana, another taboo subject on the cusp of wider acceptance in the early 70’s. A fascinating stamp in time, Weed was made in the shadow of the ongoing work of the Shafer Commission, President Nixon’s fact-finding panel that rose from the National Commission of Marijuana and Drug Abuse and de Renzy uses it as the catalyst to get out there into America and beyond to take a look at the killer weed and the attitudes surrounding it. Easily de Renzy’s best documentary work, it’s also not a stretch to call Weed one of his best all-around efforts.
Like de Renzy’s Innocents Abroad, Weed is a globetrotting affair, and it opens in Missouri where the marijuana grows wild and the authorities don’t seem to mind too much as the biggest issue is the impact that the proposed eradication of the marijuana fields would have on the local ecosystem. We are then whisked to Mexico where we scour the mountainsides for wild bumper crops, and evade the cops at the border and ports of entry where the audience is given a pretty thorough primer on smuggling (we even see a boat being seized!). But it’s the film’s trip up to Calgary that provides Weed’s greatest moments as the sojourn itself feels more than just a transition in a documentary film. The entire passage is blessed with the kind of communal spirit that would move forward into de Renzy’s early narrative sex films, and it is such a nice and authentic dip into the hippie world as it was beginning to crest and slowly melt into more traditional domesticity. Sporting some of the film’s most gorgeous moments, it’s just magical stuff.
Following the Canadian cool-down, de Renzy plunges his crew into the sweltering heat of Vietnam, a live-wire location where the filmmakers wander in and out of the markets purchasing marijuana of all kinds. All of the Vietnam footage is astonishing and priceless, but most especially great are the shoot interviews with the American G.I.’s, all of whom look like the kind of rocked out dead-end burnouts that audiences would eventually see in Apocalypse Now. Finally, de Renzy takes the audience up to Nepal where we get to see compressed hash and corn marijuana for sale throughout Kathmandu. But this particular passage of the film is probably at its most memorable when it’s waiting for a poor hippie girl (who has followed her almost insufferably serious boyfriend up into the mountains so he can be a translator) to deadpan that it’s been two years since her last hot bath while looking none-too-thrilled about any of it. If it were revealed that she secretly pleaded with de Renzy to get her the fuck out of this godforsaken place in exchange for doing background work in Powder Burns or Little Sisters, it wouldn’t be all that shocking a revelation.
Throughout Weed, the audience gets the impression that the film’s subject matter was something de Renzy was interested in both casually and as a natural provocateur. He certainly casts a suspicious eye on the Commission’s study on marijuana, though he needn’t have been so worried as they concluded that pot wasn’t a big deal (not that Nixon was going to listen to them if they came away with anything but a thumbs down, something the president made clear from the beginning of their mission). Maybe de Renzy could have carved out a unique niche as a documentarian of the forbidden or socially impolite. But, c’mon, there was ultimately far more money in the taboo-shattering world of pornography and that route promised to be more fun, too. In that vein, it’s fun to see early onscreen credits for Paul Aratow and Edwin Brown, both of whom are deemed “important helpers.” Both Aratow and Brown would find solid homes in adult filmmaking, cross-collaborating on Aratow’s China Girl in 1974, and Brown becoming a filmmaking fixture at Essex later on in the decade.
And even Weed can’t fully escape the libidinous eye of Alex de Renzy as he takes a slight detour somewhere in the middle with the two couples and the hydroponic grow all of which feels like the kind of zany comedy setups in his narrative features to come, replete with a little T&A tease. In the Nepal portion of the movie, de Renzy focuses on the erotic carvings outside of a temple, and it’s probably not an accident that “Ok… where are the girls?” is one of the last lines spoken in the film. As it is said by a lawyer who has gone on a long spiel about the dangers and futility of marijuana decriminalization, it’s a subconscious chart of de Renzy’s career which, after this, would be 100% committed to the blue movie.
(C) Copyright 2025, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 