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In Manhattan, Warhol and his menagerie of proto-punks were waiting to oblige destiny. Edie was the woman of their dreams: good family, silver-tinsel hair, Twiggy shape and a quick wit that could be impish or lacerating. She was a chic slummer in Warhol's 8-mm movies; she boogied through the New York fashion and gossip columns; Vogue dubbed her a "youthquaker," and LIFE photographed her as a baby-faced mannequin dressed up in Momma's cast-off clothes. It was a high life for the renegade deb, and she lived it high on speed, cocaine, heroin and a mountain of pills. She lost track, lost control, absentmindedly setting fire to two of her bedrooms and half a dozen mattresses, then spiraling into psychosis. A drug bust; a few asylums; shock therapy; a fatal overdose of barbiturates. And in the midst of all this, over the last five years of her life, she starred in John Palmer and David Weisman's Ciao! Manhattan. Edie Sedgwick, This Is Your Death.
From the first shot of Edie—bloated and staggering, her open jacket revealing scarred siliconed breasts, as she thumbs a ride on a California highway—it is clear that Ciao! Manhattan serves as a rancid little document of the sensibility that the Edie book furtively celebrates. No matter that Edie is called Susan in the film. This is Sunset Boulevard for real, an Acid Age Snake Pit. The film covers two historic periods: Edie Past (New York, 1965-67) and Edie Present (Los Angeles, 1970-71). In the earlier black-and-white footage, she is Queen of the Underground, flirting with her Andy, imperiously ignoring the camera. In the California color sections, she is living in a huge pastel tent at the bottom of a swimming pool, surrounded by dazzling photos of the Edie that was. She parades topless, falling over as she attempts to dance. She spins tales of her brutal father, her horny brothers, her shooting-star fame, her drug addiction, her endless days and nights in mental hospitals. So enveloping is her stupor, she can neither perform nor be herself. She can only put on pathetic display the corpse she is about to become.
The ghoulish entrepreneurial flair that characterizes much of the entertainment business may earn big money for Ciao! Manhattan, as it has done for Edie. But can the Edie phenomenon stop here? On the 20th anniversary of her death, Marilyn Monroe earned tabloid headlines. In life, Edie Sedgwick was no Marilyn; but in death she rates, at the very least, a lugubrious Hollywood biopic. Nastassia Kinski for the title role? Kristy McNichol? Brooke Shields? My dear, it's just too delicious.
— By Richard Corliss