Pink Flamingos
By Kit Macdonald
Pink Flamingos is the first of the three films John Waters dubbed his "Trash Trilogy", eventually completed by Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977). It stars the countercultural drag queen Divine, who plays a criminal living in a trailer under the name of Babs Johnson, whose self-determined claim to fame is being "the filthiest person alive".
Waters attended the Manson Family trial immediately before making Pink Flamingos and it had a deep effect on him - he later described the Family as "the real-life filthiest people alive". The film coincided with the legalisation of pornography in the US, which Waters felt left exploitation and art films with nowhere left to go in terms of shock. His solution on Pink Flamingos was to think up things that weren't illegal to do on film yet, but should have been, a train of thought that led to an unsimulated final scene that still has the power to shock half a century later.