Shown at Cannes the year before the official advent of International Critics’ Week, the out-of-competition screening of The Connection nevertheless served as the model for what the Semaine was to become. Clarke’s debut feature was a canny adaptation of Jack Gelber’s celebrated Off-Broadway play about a group of heroin addicts waiting for their “connection.” While the original Living Theater production had used a play-within-a-play strategy for its narration, Clarke devised a more cinematic frame involving a documentary director at work on his cinema-vérité portrait of the drug scene—a technique which, as the distinguished French critic Georges Sadoul pointed out, “works brilliantly in this film.” While the film garnered rave reviews at Cannes (even the conservative American trade journal Variety noted that it would be a hit in “enlightened spots”), it faced a withering censorship battle back in the States that delayed its release by a year and a half.