On Screen

...By contrast to the longhairs, the straights come off rather well in For-man and Weller's adaptation...

...He probably believes that the movie concerns a heroic labor struggle in a Southern mill town and its effect on the eponymous young mill hand (Sally Field...

...Or maybe the whole enterprise is completely and commercially cynical...

...Hitler would have loved such a slogan, of course...

...But Hassett's acting cannot redeem the stupidity of Marjorie Kel-logg's screenplay...

...Hassett plays Esther Greenwood, a poet and honors student who works one summer as a guest editor at the fictional Ladies' Day (Plath worked at Mademoiselle) and then suffers a nervous breakdown (as did Plath) that leads to her institutionalization...

...Ironically, the film Hair makes quite evident just how ugly—morally and esthetically—those "beautiful people" really were...

...Her fiance, Buddy (Jameson Parker), is stolid and sexually unappealing, while a handsome and sexy suitor (Thaao Penghlis) turns out to be a woman-hating rapist...

...Like the novel, the movie indulges its heroine well beyond the limits of tolerance...

...Her college roommate is more morbid than Esther, besides being a not-so-latent lesbian...

...This less than flattering portrait is especially surprising because the screenplay was written by Michael Weller, whose play Moonchildren offered a more sentimental view of the counterculture...

...And Ritt further undermined himself by evoking an extremely powerful performance from Paul Newman in the title role—which brings us to the second common feature of his films, his talented handling of actors...

...Thus it is no accident that the decade's chief contribution to ethical discourse was to give new meaning to the word "beautiful...

...Gait Mac-Dermot's score was curiously out of place even in the original stage version, since it had only a nodding acquaintance with hard rock, the real music of the counterculture...

...Her mother (played by Julie Harris, who used to specialize in neurotic roles herself) is an unstable old maid...

...Consequently, much as I would like to believe that he intended to debunk the myth of the '60s, I'm forced to conclude that Forman simply did not know what kind of movie he was making, or what its effect on the audience would be...

...Her Ladies' Day boss (hilariously overplayed by Barbara Barrie) is a parody of a hard-bitten, Joan Crawford-like career woman...

...Some of the scenes look as if they were shot in Czechoslovakia (his native land) rather than Central Park...

...When Reuben Marshasky (Ron Leibman), a New York Jewish labor organizer, arrives in the factory town run by the O. P. Henley Company (obviously modeled after J. P. Stevens), the mill workers are passively suffering at the hands of their tight-fisted, paternalistic management...

...indulge in a good deal of sentimental nonsense about the redeeming power of literature (Reuben's breakthrough to Norma Rae is symbolized by her reading one of his copies of the works of Dylan Thomas...

...In between, we witness a lot of semi-romantic activity, as Reuben woos the married Norma Rae in the name of labor...

...But those who must live with the moral consequences of their acts cannot afford to look at right and wrong from the perspective of a disinterested esthete...

...Some of his "I-can't-believe-what-I'm-seeing-but-rm-not-about-to-admit-it" double takes are quite amusing, particularly when directed at the frenetically hustling Berger...

...One night, it seems, the two of them are working late, mimeographing fliers and stuffing envelopes...

...The direction by Larry Peerce (Goodbye, Columbus) is as agonizingly simple-minded as the script...

...Nevertheless, the film is well worth seeing because once again Ritt has elicited a striking performance—this time from Field, who makes visible what the script merely suggests, the character's transformation from morose obstinacy to principled resistance...

...As for Forman, it is hard to tell exactly what he is up to...

...Her fellow student editors are empty-headed coeds?particularly Doreen (Mary Louise Weller), a sex-starved Southern belle...

...and the next day the union brings management to its knees...

...Perhaps Hair is supposed to appeal to both those who see the '60s as a paradise lost and those who regard the decade as a bad dream...

...The music and choreography, on the other hand, add little...

...Perhaps it was his foreigner's eye that permitted him to create his unflattering portrait of the counterculture...

...Another particularly insidious modern idea was succinctly formulated recently by Twyla Tharp, who wrote, "It seems to me that esthetics and ethics are the same...

...Even the apparently kind psychiatrist (Anne Jackson) submits Esther to electro-shock therapy...

...Tharp's choreography is inane, too...

...A man representing a superior culture (political awareness, good literature) enlightens a downtrodden woman and then graciously refuses to take advantage of her: Cinderella, with a truly liberating ending (he frees her from her chains and from himself as well...

...None of her utterances, no matter how self-dramatizing or banal, is presented with less than total seriousness...

...It was a measure of the director's anachronistic political sympathies that he failed to anticipate the enormous appeal of Hud's cynical egoism...

...Indeed, his 19 movies over 22 years have only two things in common...

...Reuben's first meeting with a small group of disgruntled employees is particulary weak: Instead of airing weighty grievances, they gripe over relatively minor matters, such as the bricking up of windows...

...This inclines me to believe that, despite its claim to being a serious examination of the working man's situation, Norma Rae is really a post-woman's lib love story...

...For instance, the leading character, the supposedly lovable hippie Berger (originally played on stage by Gerome Ragni, the play's coauthor, and acted in the movie by Treat Williams), now appears to be exactly what he was all along—a panhandling, kidnapping, overbearing hooligan...

...Field is so good, in fact, that we can almost forgive Norma Rae its offhand treatment of serious issues and its folderol about literature and liberated love...

...In addition, while Reuben tells Norma Rae that she is the key to organizing the plant, we never discover what role she actually plays...

...Reuben is unable to bridge the gap between his political and cultural tradition and their history of sullen albeit uncomplaining poverty—until he manages to spark the activism of Norma Rae, who in turn incites her fellow workers to unionize and to halt work temporarily...

...If you have seen any of her works, you've probably already seen all there is to the dancing in Hair...

...Plath was as much its victim as she was its adherent...

...A strong performance is also given by Marilyn Hassett in The Bell Jar, adapted from Sylvia Plath's confessional novel...

...Yet the music and the choreography embody everything that Forman seems to be satirizing...

...To begin with, Ritt and his screenwriters (Irving Rav-etch and Harriet Frank Jr...

...No doubt Ritt wanted to understate matters somewhat, but the dialogue is so halting and the scene so awkwardly staged that the effect is to trivialize their complaints...

...Nonetheless, it is fitting that Tharp was called upon by director Milos For-man to choreograph the movie version of the decade-old Hair?the counterculture's hit musical—for the "new sensibility" of the '60s perfectly embodied such an estheticized morality...

...Nor does Peerce spare us his palette of pastels or his soft-(really out-of-) focus cinematography...

...I was shocked," he said, "when young audiences idolized Hud and wrote letters telling me they hated 'the stuffed shirt old man'" (Melvyn Douglas, as Hud's father), who was intended to express Ritt's own liberal-humanistic sentiments...

...I'm neurotic as hell," she says—as if we needed telling...

...Unfortunately, the film fails as a convincing account of labor strife...

...the stress on color rather than value contrasts is more typical of European than American films and filmmakers...

...The belief that a Philistine culture is to blame when a "sensitive" artist cracks up has been one of the most dangerous modernist cliches...

...Norma Rae's rise to consciousness and the politicization of her coworkers are equally implausible...

...the next night they are joined by a dozen workers...

...No unsympathetic character is spared unflattering closeups, and no opportunity is wasted to match the hysteria of the story with hysterical techniques (quick blackouts, rapid cutting, the unsubtle juxtaposition of scenes...

...John Savage milks the part of Claude, the innocent hick, for all it is worth...

...Still, the people in Esther's life are presented as unworthy of breathing the same air...

...For one thing, the plight of the mill hands is never sufficiently dramatized...

...The first is an enormous gap between intention and ultimate impact...

...It didn't matter what you did, as long as you wore the right costume (especially hair...

...These faults, though, are small compared to the film's greatest shortcoming—its bland acceptance of the myth that madness is a form of "sanity" in an "insane" world that oppresses minorities (poets, feminists avant la let-tre, and so on...

...Both characteristics are apparent in Ritt's latest effort, Norma Rae...

...Never does it occur to Kellogg that Plath's paranoia was responsible for the crude caricatures...

...For example, Ritt recently told the New York Times that Hud was meant to be "a deeply moral film about the American heel-hero Clark Gable used to play for half a film before he got converted...

...When he dances one of Tharp's hurky-jerky numbers on a dinner table to outrage a gathering of "squares," he becomes a perfect example of the self-righteous and self-contradictory contempt for the middle class that motivated much of the '60s activism...

...Just as often, though, he has either offered us complete losers (The Great White Hope) or botched potentially interesting assignments (The Outrage, The Front...

...True, about halfway through the story Norma Rae's father does die of "brown lung," yet we are simply told this was the cause, and that makes all the difference...

...the screenplay unselfconsciously takes the novel at face value...

...There is, however, no consummation, even of the most minor sort (not so much as a kiss...