I’m working on a project these days that has me cataloging films released in the years between 1970 and 2000. On one level, it’s simple data entry… entering movie titles and pertinent production information (director, principal cast, production company, distributor, genre, rights holder) and good mindless employment; on another level it’s been an incredibly evocative and nostalgic head trip for me. I was 9 in 1970 — actually 8 for most of that year — but I was already walking myself half a mile into town to go to the movies alone. I have vivid memories of going to see a lot of the films released in 1970 but what this perspective has given me is a whole new appreciation of how diverse the American movie scene was 40 odd years ago. There were westerns (RIO LOBO, LITTLE BIG MAN, MONTE WALSH) and war films (PATTON, TORA! TORA! TORA!, THE MCKENZIE BREAK, M*A*S*H) and love stories (LOVE STORY, RYAN’S DAUGHTER, THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT) and horror movies (THE DUNWICH HORROR and THE VAMPIRE LOVERS and COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE), biker flicks (ANGEL UNCHAINED, REBEL ROUSERS, ANGELS DIE HARD!) and sex comedies (PUSSYCAT, PUSSYCAT, I LOVE YOU) and dramas (THE WAY WE LIVE NOW) and crime pictures (… TICK TICK TICK…, THEY CALL ME MR. TIBBS, A BULLET FOR PRETTY BOY )and musicals (SONG OF NORWAY). There were movies about spies and assassins and mad housewives and hillbillies and cops on the case… and teenagers.
The uptake in unrest on college campuses worldwide through the mid-1960s and into the new decade led to a string of big studio movies about students and their concerns and explorations of radical politics. By the time of the horrific killings of student protesters at Ohio’s Kent State University in May of that year, Michelangelo Antonioni’s ZABRISKIE POINT had been out for three months, Stanley Kramer’s R.P.M. and Stuart Hagmann’s THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT were already in the can and Richard Rush’s GETTING STRAIGHT – a decidedly more lightweight campus drama (the studio emphasized the free love angle in their advertisements and one sheets, depicting star Elliot Gould as a kind of coital Candide) that nonetheless ends in a full blown police riot — was a week from being rolled out into movie theaters. Talk about serendipity.
The moviegoing demographic was changing, was getting younger, and other films not specifically concerned with college life were also filtering through, among them HOMER, starring Don Scardino as a Wisconsin farmboy radicalized by the death of his buddy in Vietnam; Paul Bogart’s HALLS OF ANGER, about racial tension in an inner city high school; Leonard Horn’s THE MAGIC GARDEN OF STANLEY SWEETHEART, with Don Johnson as a would-be campus pornographer; and THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR, about a suburban family (Eli Wallach and Julie Harris — now there’s a couple! Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez and Emily Dickinson) dealing with a drug-using daughter. In the same calendar year, Jon Voight — fresh from his success in MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) — played both a Long Island high school senior (at the age of 32) dealing with love and loss in Paul Williams’ OUT OF IT and a campus radical who feels betrayed by both the right and the left in Williams’ follow-up, THE REVOLUTIONARY. It’s great to go back and note the interest that the Establishment (for want of a better word) had in the youth of that time, though naturally not all of it was well-intentioned. Kids who felt ill-served by the legacy of Eisenhower America, who wanted to grow out their brush cuts or pop their bouffants, who wanted to listen to voices other than Richard Nixon and Bishop Fulton Sheen and Perry Como, who wondered why we were sending 16 year old boys to Southeast Asia (and so on and so on) were often derided in popular entertainment as flakes and hippies and hypocrites who broke from their radical cells on Friday afternoon to bring their laundry home to Mom to do over the weekend. Things were changing and the studio elite was afraid of both the change and the changers, and the first response in many artistic circles to fear is to mock and belittle and so there was a lot of that in movies like Hy Averback’s I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! (1968) and Garson Kanin’s WHERE IT’S AT (1969) and Russ Meyer’s (Roger Ebert-scripted) BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970), which can be viewed as either great camp fun or the worst nightmare of every 40ish taxpayer with a closet full of Sans-a-belt slacks.
Some producers tried to hedge their bets, giving the public a youth movie with an older protagonist for balance. In R.P.M. (an apt, if perhaps a bit too on-the-money pun, the anagram standing for “revolutions per minute,” and evoking both campus unrest and the youthful inclination towards protest music as a seminal text), campus radicals Gary Lockwood (then 33) and Paul Winfield (31) have to take a narrative back seat to Anthony Quinn, as a middle-aged (but cycle-riding) sociology professor (the actor was 45 at the time) who finds himself mediating between the kids and the college administration (while carrying on with graduate student Ann-Margret, then a pink-cheeked 29). You could take Stanley Kramer’s tale two ways, as a realistic depiction of a rational man’s response to youthful wrongheadedness or as a cop-out (which tends to be the revisionist spin on any Kramer movie) that admits, somewhat coyly, that the radicals were right in theory but cannot let them triumph in reality. The Tate-LaBiance murders of August 1969, seemingly perpetrated by hippies but really spawned by a galloping case of white supremacy on the part of instigator Charles Manson, got middle America to stop fretting so much about race war and to focus instead on the Generation Gap, with hippies promoted on the fear factor from mere irritants to potential home invaders, like the Red Indians of so-called progressive westerns, whose aboriginal protagonists were depicted with fairness only on condition that they also die in the end.
GETTING STRAIGHT narrowed the Generation Gap considerably but it was still a major studio wanting it both ways, wanting to foreground student radicalization but through the relatively safer perspective of someone older and more experienced. Thirty-three year-old Elliot Gould plays 28 year-old Harry Bailey, a Vietnam veteran who returns to college six years late to finish up a teaching degree, only to find himself recruited by the campus left (in the person of Max Julien, Jeannie Berlin, and John Rubinstein) and tapped by the college deans (Jon Lormer, Cecil Kellaway, and Jeff Corey) to act as an intermediary before the National Guard has to be called in. Based on the novel by Ken Kolb (best known, I guess, for writing the screenplay for THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD), adapted by Robert Kaufman (whose crazyquilt CV runs the gamut from DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE to FREEBIE AND THE BEAN), GETTING STRAIGHT is fast and funny and quotable but I like it less now than I did when I was an impressionable youth — and it’s mostly Elliot Gould’s fault, or rather the fault of the device Gould plays. Less a character than a prism, Gould is supposed to refract the respective lunacy of both right and left, of young and old, to prove to us the old chestnut “Lord, what fools these mortals be.” I understand the reaction but the ending, in which Gould and leading lady Candice Bergen make love, not war (literally — shedding their clothes in the middle of a campus riot, with tear gas canisters going off around them and fuzzy heads being cracked by storm trooper truncheons), strikes me as far too pat and pleased with itself and there’s an undercurrent of homophobia that, you should pardon the expression, kind of queers it for me. But on the plus side, a ridiculously young Harrison Ford pops up to share a couple of dialogue exchanges with Gould and it’s kind of fascinating to appreciate now how Ford’s career was ascending towards megastardom with STAR WARS while Gould’s promise as a sort of alt-leading man was squandered in such stinkers as S*P*Y*S (1974), WHIFFS (1975), and MATILDA (1978).
So fresh in their day, so au courant, these campus movies have not aged well — by that I mean they have lapsed into obscurity, less well remembered by the general public than all those westerns and war movies and monster flicks. Millennials snigger at their fashions, conservatives bristle at their politics and (it’s a fair cop) naivete, and they tend to get relegated to the bin of oddments, relics. And yet it’s rewarding to go back and see something like THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT or THE REVOLUTIONARY, which had the temerity to stick with a consistent perspective, that of youth, and follow it to, if not an inevitable conclusion, then at least a logical and fair one. At age 24, Bruce Davison and Kim Darby were not too far grown to play college undergrads and costar Bud Cort was a year behind them. (Darby was already a seasoned professional at this point in her career, having first played a teenager in BYE BYE BIRDIE almost ten years earlier and having just appeared in George Schaefer’s GENERATION, alongside David Janssen in Disapproving Father mode… a prototype he was honing to perfection that year, having played a similar character in WHERE IT’S AT.) I guess it’s worth noting that the same year THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT was released, Davison starred as a wacked out youth in WILLARD and Bud Cort as a wacked out youth in BREWSTER MCCLOUD – both of whom wind up dead by the final frames. Darby was a hippie in NORWOOD, also released in 1970, and her character winds up pregnant, as she had in GENERATION to boot.
The one campus movie of 1970 that probably everybody remembers is Disney’s THE COMPUTER WORE TENNIS SHOES, the first of a series of campus comedies distributed by Buena Vista that took place at the fictional Medfield College (which had made its first film appearance in THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR back in 1961) and featured a gaggle of irrepressible but harmless young tearaways led by Kurt Russell (actually college-aged, at 20). I’ll confess to loving Disney’s “Dexter Reilly” movies as much as I do any of the above-mentioned titles but looking back it’s hard not to appreciate the way The Mouse clamps its iron hand down on the notion of student politics, wanting to quash any hint of unrest and smooth everything out into a latticework of hijinks and antics, to comfort and reassure middle class America that its investments are sound and its children BEACH PARTY harmless. Well, to each his own, I guess. I hope I’ve inspired some of you to go back and have a look, or maybe even a second look at some of these titles. Making a study of the different ways they view the world and the people who were/are poised to change the world is, in retrospect, a little like going back to school.