Hollywood Discovers "The Revolution"

...a clever thing to do...

...Fixit...

...It is possible for opportunism, a pretty fixed quality, to insinuate itself into the unstable world of idealism and so transform it into a mess of platitudes...

...The Strawberry Statement doesn't go much be yond this in analyzing the sickness...

...Stanley Kauffman, writing in The New Republic, spoke of it as a distinguished failure that "touches some note of truth" in everything it explores, and went on to invoke Matthew Arnold on the crisis of our culture...

...So I have to confess I do not know what to think of the following: A reac tionary crew jock tells Simon that he has decided to join the Movement...

...Another such word is mentioned rather less often: opportunism...

...A strange cross between Berkeley and Columbia, these revolve around a People's Park-cum-Children's Playground, the presence of ROTC on campus, university expansion into the ghetto community, and defense contracts...

...If an unfaithful rich man gets an abortion for his mistress, you show him watching television...

...Toward this aspect of student radicalism— the straight-on mass conversions to the Move ment—Horovitz and Hagmann are inclined to be humorous and serious alternately...

...My own favorite remark is still, "I wonder if the Paris Commune was this boring," uttered by one of the force occupying the president's office...

...it is a position taken in bad faith...

...and by setting it against the various kinds of action it describes one might hope to arrive at a clear view of student protest...

...and suddenly the abortion is something . . . well, something more important...

...Perhaps it was misleading to say the directing of Getting Straight is without distinction, since Richard Rush does have an inverse talent for getting the right detail...

...What consistency the film does have lies in that it is equally heavy-handed in its opening shot (the hero working out for crew, framed in a long view by barbed wire) and in the closing ones (guardsmen racing up the gymnasium steps to evict protesting students, and trampling, on the way, over the university motto that reads "Truth—Liberty—Toleration...

...Hence the brick...

...In the movies opportunism is the tendency to reach beyond a modest subject matter, dressing up happy domestic truths with some imagined larger significance, thus, through slick editing, to achieve counterfeit social relevance...

...MOVIES The sight perturbed me, I have to admit...

...It is worth noting that The Strawberry Statement and Getting Straight both move, inevitably, toward a bloody struggle between students and police, while neither film knows (or at any rate tells) exactly why the struggle has come about...

...that decently sane protest is being drowned out by SDS...

...It's like Don Quixote, Balzac . . . that nineteenth-century romanticism [sic...

...La Chinoise was something different entirely, a terribly ambitious film disguised as a bit of fluff...

...What in the world is this black woman doing in the film...

...At one point, Simon's girl friend, who wants him to quit crew, lets fly with that most useful shibboleth of campus activism, "This strike is part of something real," and is met with a fitting reply: "Crew is real too...

...The MOVIES "revolutionary" youth films retain this element and add something new...

...And not until specific questions are asked does one begin to see how far these films are from communing with any kind of reality—with the reality, let us say, of Black Studies at Wesleyan or Antioch...

...This country used to have a dream that things could be different," avers Simon, protagonist, "and now everybody's content to just sit on their ass [sic...

...This was to be an act of terrorism directed against the civilian French —it was, in some sense, the expedient murder of innocent people...

...And in contemplating the hackneyed moralism of Stanley Kramer, no one whose concern for moral problems carried him beyond the 100-odd minutes spent in a theater could forbear echoing the judgment of Pauline Kael: "Original Sin meets Mr...

...Rush has done his best to give it the tone of bustling, nervous life, yet students just do not jam the staircases in college—there are no unified class hours...

...The gassing is played up for all possible reminiscence of Auschwitz and the rest, with students lying on the floor submissively while the National Guard enter and with SS calm turn on a specially contrived portable indoor gas machine...

...Their norm of political awareness is set by the girl who, early in the film, urges Harry to rejoin the Movement, because, she says, "in six months they'll have us all in concentration camps in Arizona...

...Whether this sort of author-hero identifica tion is what went sour in Getting Straight would be hard to say, and certainly not worth finding out...

...and ends up following the orders of an anticultural anarchist (Nechayev tacked onto Jerry Rubin...

...Hasn't life kept up with art in a very odd way...

...Even the demonstra MOVIES tions manage to be profoundly boring, with nothing happening around the edges of the frame...

...Well, there are other possible explanations: the student who reads comic books has taken Harry's advice and read Don Quixote and written a moving and illiterate note about it ("He be better than Batman...

...And in one of the most insipid moments ever put on film, a black woman grills Harry in bed: "Tell me what you think of James Baldwin...

...In both Getting Straight and The Strawberry Statement, black students keep to the periphery of the action while ideologically occupying center stage...

...Easy Rider was mostly narcotic, though, and it asked to be indulged, not taken seriously...

...This is an awful specimen of lumpenleft slop, and one that left me glassy-eyed, the more so as it was given the presumptive force of revelation...

...As for confronting the issues, the conversation between Francis Jeanson and Godard's heroine, Veronique, is modest enough in scope, but it is done with a felicity no one else has been able to touch...

...In the university of Getting Straight, a stodgy sort of president—good Hollywood stock—will not allow his minority group quota to increase by more than five blacks and five Mexican-Ameri cans, and those have to be athletes...

...One wouldn't normally so interrogate a work of art, but as neither film can claim that status, they must stand or fall as propaganda...

...As the woman walked into the room, cautiously, and laid down her basket with its explosive, the camera went full-circle to catch the faces around the room: innocent faces, faces of children, corrupt faces...

...It has tremendous power, this sequence, but it is power cheaply bought, MOVIES disingenuous, and devoutly opportunist in its gory display...

...But that is hardly going to make the problem more clearly understood...

...The conclusion of The Strawberry Statement reveals just how far its makers relied on opportunism and so were left holding a platitude, and a vicious one at that...

...Vacated" is being charitable here, since the norm of intelligent thought which Horovitz and Hagmann establish and from which they could then depart is fairly represented by the speech about everybody sitting on his ass, already quoted in full, and by one or two others like it...

...Yet the audiences seem to love it, and the worse Harry gets the more fun it is...

...and I felt some kind of extreme resentment for the men who could make the horrible and affecting last scene of that film...

...Watching the crowd scenes lifelessly unwind, I found myself asking whether this director could have made his "message" film about campus life without ever setting foot in a university...

...Civilians...

...Surely a great deal depends on the distinction between these two views, but Hagmann flirts with each of them before he decides, in the police riot with which he concludes, that he really means the second...

...there is only an interest in the spectacle for its own sake, the pure frisson of campus violence...

...their effort to "come to grips" is a disaster, bad in politics as in art, and those who care about either ought to be properly ungrateful...

...P.S...

...On history: "It's all there in Toynbee...

...that moderate students are finding themselves trapped...

...The two student genre films which it was possible to like were neither of them subject to this fad...

...There is nothing like this kind of seriousness in The Strawberry Statement, although it has a flash finale compared to which the denouement of Easy Rider looks like some mild flourish out of Carol Reed...

...Getting Straight has naturally attracted its set of admirers: Mr...

...The screenplay is bristling with literary allusions, and among the contemporary American writers whom it mentions I counted Malamud, Roth, Baldwin, Salinger, and Mailer...

...Neither film belongs to the real world, and yet there are, really, frightening things happening in front of our eyes...

...In The Graduate, the somewhat tame father of every subsequent film about youth, Benjamin stared vacantly into the bourgeois swimming pool owned by his parents: that was alienation...

...This is done in a variety of ways: close-up photography shows one sort of difference quite clearly, and this can be made to stand for others...

...The Revolutionary, I think, will survive its moment largely through the force of Jon Voight's performance...

...so that the nod and grin are made in the long run to seem saintly, mystical, instead of signifying a quick grab at what was in fashion...

...But their own attitude toward the strike-withoutgrievance is nowhere very certain...

...Again, who is kidding whom...

...What distinguishes The Strawberry Statement from Getting Straight is its occasionally good eye for detail, even if this saving grace is altogether swamped by directorial confusion...

...Starting from a purely verbal existence, these platitudes get read back into reality, only with more conviction since the readers are idealistic, and then, somehow, the end result is violence...

...So that in looking at the old anti-McCarthyitefilms like High Noon and Point of Order, what an audience notices, right off, is in how much finer a way the documentary makes its point...

...Starting off in the "Radical Committee" (SDS), he moves into something more serious called "the League" (CPUSA...

...But as I thought of doing this, it was hard not to remember the young woman who was sobbing uncontrollably as she left the theater where The Strawberry Statement was being shown...

...It is when detail passes out of focus that the film comes down hard on the side of the students: the university president, for instance, is never named so far as I can recall—he is the Platonic all-president, Grayson Hayakawa...

...cut to a newsreel of Vietnamese children being napalmed...

...The other youth movies have not worked this way, and The Strawberry Statement carries to a ridiculous extreme the structural carelessness—which runs into characterlessness— that has been creeping into American films since The Graduate...

...Antonioni was special in refusing pop music a central place in his film, which meant MOVIES Zabriskie Point would look open-ended (like his other films) yet without having to depend on ballast material supplied by Simon and Garfunkel...

...Simon is one of those who wandered into the "revolution," and as such he can be counted part of a formidable group...

...Still, these Hollywood concoctions will help along the process of disintegration, and in this—how to say it?—they have their function...

...And in being dishonest about what it is up to, it differs from a film like Easy Rider, which had the virtue of doing the Discover America myth in an engagingly thoughtless way, with its rock music nicely fitted to the highway landscape...

...None of this would matter, except that Getting Straight is intended to depict an intellectual man's rejection of the academic life...

...Whatever you see in this film, the opposite of it will come reasonably close to the real world...

...Kaufman has given Harry a terrific quantity of florid speeches, but it never fails to be a false eloquence, and this self-declared rebel sounds like Moloch rather than Satan...

...then, too, adults are used pretty selectively—they tend to be vulgar haute bourgeois or (what is worse) vulgar petit bourgeois, and they are never politically enlightened, intelligent, or sexy...

...Show business liberals, normally a cynical bunch, have embraced what is for them a new and burning issue...

...And it is in the real world that the platitudes offered by these films will bear their fruit...

...Perhaps this is quibbling, but the film has more odious mistakes that seem part of the same phenomenon...

...For in locale as well as incident, the campus here looks to be a moderately convincing, somewhat overpacked high school...

...For they propose a solution to our problems, brought to its formu lation in extremis during the climactic scene of Getting Straight, where Candice Bergen sweetly entices Elliot Gould with a brick, which he then lobs through an expensive window of the build ing in which he has just flunked his Master's oral...

...Then the question—"Well, do you feel different...

...The Strawberry Statement, much the less execrable film in this as in other respects, tries to give some impression of the kinds of issues that were involved...

...NOT ONLY The Strawberry Statement but nearly all recent films involving young people, from Goodbye, Columbus through Zabriskie Point, have avoided political and social issues by rendering the young aesthetically more lovable than their elders...

...Of course there is a method to it, and it consists of opting out of all narrative difficulties by interlarding the body of the film with musically-based montages: lovers gamboling as in A Man and A Woman, or those wonderful ads for Olympia beer, all full of touching lyrics—"soaring in the sunshine," "wind blowing through your hair," things like that...

...Their hero joins the strike casually, having been notified by his roommate that the occupied building will be "crawling with chicks," while before this the peak of his political consciousness has been marked in a brief conversation with a racist cop, terminated by the mildly amusing but not terribly cogent remark, "Mister, you're a shit...

...But that is what happens in Getting Straight, until—in a move explicable only by the vicissitudes of his sexual life— Harry Bailey chooses to throw his rock and join the Movement, whose rhetoric is still bad...

...After seeing to what extent black power in whatever form is central to the version of radicalism shown in these films, would it be right, I wonder, to ask the filmmakers whether they know of the existence of Bayard Rustin, Eugene Genovese, Kenneth B. Clark, and other distinctly nonracist souls who have had reservations about Black Studies and black power from time to time...

...It is not easy to convey the tone of these stupid little rants, though it can be said that misogyny figures in them as an important element, and that they are supposed to show Harry's progress from an immature plague-on-both-your-houses attitude to his final acquiescence in radicalism for destruction's sake, which comes to represent the only good life Left...

...Suppression breeds violence...

...These references are all half-literate, and Kaufman, working out of a third-hand vogue of Leslie Fiedler, will decide comic books are not so bad by giving Harry a line such as, "I know what got me about these...

...Their seriousness, however, is of a kind that should not permit them to be lightheaded as well, since they do not say only, "These kids take themselves very seriously and we ought to worry about that," but also, finally, "These kids are right and we fool ourselves to laugh at them...

...Hagmann takes a cavalier view of student as opposed to police violence, which we may pass over for the moment, noting only that he has succeeded in pleasing student audiences...

...Lindsay Anderson's If . . . made not the slightest pretense of being realistic about its adult characters, even if it drew strength from the realism of its English public school atmosphere, and so one could watch the machinegunning of grownups with no more horror than one would have reading the same type of thing, say, in Auden's The Orators...

...Violence on film, it has to be said, does not necessarily produce crude answers to difficult questions...

...These events are treated as loworder epiphanies, whereby Harry learns (a) that he genuinely communicates as a teacher and as a person, and (b) that the university is no place for genuine folk...

...These are the people who will be killed by the AIgerian woman's act of sabotage, the camera said, and Pontecorvo did his best to make this violence complicated even while he showed, throughout his film, why it was necessary...

...This reasoning, strike for whatever reason you can think of, has become quite common among some of the student radicals, and the makers of The Strawberry Statement (screenwriter Israel Horovitz...

...Can it be that the people who made Getting Straight believe this...

...The auteur in this case must be screenwriter Robert Kaufman, since nothing about the directing of Getting Straight separates it from the style of any number of other films...

...Harvard comes in later for good measure, when a revolutionary harangue is heard to contain the words of Cambridge poster fame, "Strike to seize control of your life—Strike to become more human— Strike because there's no poetry in your classes," and the like...

...Cut into the playground scene in three or four spots is the enormous, benevolent face of a black matron laughing her delighted laugh to show how much she approves...

...and one of Harry's oral examiners has expounded a tendentious theory of homosexuality in F. Scott Fitzgerald...

...Ignore him, he has no conscience," says Harry Bailey, the hero and a ruthless plagiarizer, of his own Avenger...

...Idealism, as in youthful idealism, would be such a word...

...Of course the ideological decline of New Left politics cannot be blamed on the recent films about student revolt, for these films come late in the day, to a movement in which muddleheads like Mike Klonsky could rise to power long ago and half of SDS be caught in a trance of old-line Stalinism...

...There are signs that this technique—helped by editing a la Richard Lester—is eroding the ability of directors, and not just their option, to put together a decent narrative...

...Logically, no one ought to believe this film, since its makers have unwittingly portrayed Harry as a prig from the start and therefore pulled the rug out from under his rebellion...

...For one thing, he works from a conception of film that is not borrowed from television and, for another, he is still a young man, not inhibited by the flatulence (i.e., superficial daring) of middle-aged commercial liberalism...

...But most of the well-observed moments do not tell in favor of the students, though mixedup intentions help to make even the best of these hard going...

...Now the film that asks for a laugh here will be wanting you, later, to share Simon's sense of outrage when he discovers that the same friend is laid up in a hospital, having been pummelled by a gang of jocks who held, as it were, to their reactionary guns...

...and of Godard it must be said that he succeeded where no other director even dared to tread, in living with and utterly submerging himself in the Maoist ideology of his characters, returning with a portrait that had no trouble being at once sympathetic and critical...

...Alas, I think I know, and her face was one way, probably the most opportune (which must be le mot juste), to fill the space vacated by intelligent thought...

...And this means that the political mindlessness of films about youth corresponds to an artistic lag, induced (as it so often is) by a commercial fad...

...God knows there is enough insanity in our political life right now, without the silly well-intending liberals who did The Strawberry Statement and the silly corrupt liberals who did Getting Straight adding to it all...

...Being myself a sometime participant in the Movement, I know that there are girls—and boys—who talk like that, and I know also that only a very cynical cultural historian would have most of the rhetoric taking place at this level...

...Simon thinks of this as a joke, but his fellow athlete insists that, no, he is for real...

...and at this point Harry (who is mounting one of those staircases) answers to the effect of "let it wait for my orals...

...I should have liked to dismiss the campus films as lightweight nonsense, remarking only that The Strawberry Statement is a good deal less unctuous than its competitor...

...False connections of this kind do tend to destroy people's minds, though how much so it is hard to say...

...There is no concern to trace the event from its beginning, to find out where each party, student body and administration, may have gone wrong...

...For his shameless indulgence in "rigging the survey," Antonioni will serve future directors as a limiting case past which films would have to be replaced by placards...

...Early in The Strawberry Statement a number of rowdy students swarm the fence of the disputed playground area and subject the policemen guarding it to a rather unfortunate hazing...

...That Godard has lately put himself through the rigmarole of Communist self-abasement, calling his past work bourgeois reactionary art, only tells how far he has gone toward becoming one of his own characters...

...Now such a lack of sophistication is not in itself unusual, for American directors have not, characteristically, treated political issues with even a moderate degree of subtlety...

...The climax of the film comes out of a long series of heroic indirections, but when it comes it is final enough: "A" gets to have the central position in a plot to assassinate an unsympathetic judge...

...Certainly, he takes that course thinking that the violence of those in authority must work retrospectively to justify everything the students have done, which is precisely how a politically moderate student would react...

...IT IS UNFORTUNATE that some reviewers should have considered The Revolutionary alongside the other campus movies, for Paul Williams directs with far greater sensitivity than his colleagues, who are more expensively publicized...

...It is all decorated in backgrounds of anonymous-drab, and this, although it lends some conviction to the picture's try at universality, is mostly a sign of confusion, of doubt as to the actual habitat of our revolutionaries...

...That historical worth should be found in this hack film is regrettable, for it is above all else a work of sly anti-intellectualism...

...Indeed, the most characteristic feature of Zabriskie Point was its use of billboards, though I cannot help recalling one other sequence of almost unbearable inanity: that of a middle-aged couple making their godforsaken vacation tour of landmarks, along with icecreamslurping little ones, the poor flabby husband decked out in plaid bermudas and sneakers with a camera dangling round his neck, and all of it set as a "foil" against the dumb but Spontaneous romp of Mark and Daria...

...For it is in the real world that four people were sickeningly slaughtered at Kent State University after the President of the United States called them "bums...

...Before settling down to the happy spectacle of broken glass and "trashed" buildings—the destruction that goes on is such as no actual group of students has yet committed— Getting Straight treats the student protesters with an awful condescension...

...AN AGE DEFINES ITSELF by the words it brings to prominence...

...In the past, political films were caricatures of our political life because the conflicts they portrayed were so absurdly schematic, which meant that the conclusions they reached—however much on the "right" side—looked insultingly free of doubt...

...Voight plays a quite specific character within an abstracted and falsely metaphysical structure: he has a limp and a slight stammer, yet he must be named "A...

...greeted by a nod and an off-center grin...

...which meant that it was, however unintentionally, a harmless enterprise...

...director Stuart Hagmann) were right to let it show up...

...Or whether they can imagine any criticisms on their own...

...James Simon Kunen, who contributed the title of his book to the movie, gets to appear in a nice bit of ad lib as the prospective chairman of a strike meeting, with the usual banter about somebody-might-object-to-my-chairingthemeeting-so-let's-vote-on-it...

...In The Battle of Algiers there was an astonishing scene, set inside a cafeteria in which one of the Algerian revolutionaries, a woman, had been ordered to plant a bomb...

...They are seen as the exploited peoples of America and the Third World living within the campus community, and even in Getting Straight, where the organizer for Black Studies has a rather irritating sing-song manner, they are looked on with great respect...