Andy Warhol's Moralist.(Flashback)(Paul Morrissey)

Catholic reactionaries are not unknown in the world of motion pictures: there is Mel Gibson, of course, and director Eric Rohmer, whose The Lady and the Duke is the most unflattering depiction of the French Revolution ever committed to film. But no Catholic reactionary moviemaker is as mind-bogglingly unlikely as Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol's 1960s sidekick, whose oeuvre includes such films as Trash, Flesh, Heat, Blood for Dracula, and Flesh for Frankenstein, with nary a Bing Crosby priest among them.

Paul Morrissey was formed by his family and his Catholic education. Son of a Westchester County lawyer and graduate of Fordham University, Morrissey made experimental films before hooking up with producer Warhol to make movies about junkies, gay hustlers, and drag queens including the infamous "Holly" of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." Morrissey always denied that he was celebrating transgressive behavior; his theme, rather, was "people trying to survive all the freedoms they have been cursed with."

Freedom is the villain in Morrissey's films. He explained, "Pandering to the basest instincts, the stupid liberal says, 'Let it all hang out., 'Do whatever you feel like doing.' With three big carrots--sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll they rule, they have the power, they control life under them with a much stronger hold than the Soviet dictators with their enforced puritanism ever dreamed possible. But what I think people really crave is a familial identity, not a sexual identity. Unfortunately, once you're cast adrift from custom and tradition they all want it on their own inverted terms."

Unlike other denizens of Warhol's Factory loft, Morrissey was no lapsed Catholic. He dismissed Vatican II innovations as "hippie garbage" and held tightly to the catechism of his boyhood: "I still believe every word of what they told me then. Nothing of what they tell me now."

His most sympathetic explicator, Maurice Yacowar, author of The Films of Paul Morrissey, calls him "America's most undervalued and least shown major director."Yacowar ...