cherns-2 Reviews

Getting Straight (1970)

Only time I ever felt like trashing a theatre (very small spoilers)

[1/10 · 23 May 2007]

I saw this film as a student, when it first came out. As someone who was involved with important issues like the Vietnam War and civil rights and free speech, I was totally offended by the film's nihilism, the ideas that students demonstrate just because that's what today's students do, and that there are no substantive issues involved. The film is all about the main character's life style and sex life, and (as I recall) his meaningful, altruistic, innovative, and condescending attempt to teach literature to ghetto kids by getting them to read comic books.

In addition, (as I recall) we are clearly supposed to sympathize with the main character for being in trouble because he was caught cheating at an exam. At the schools I went to at the time, we took our politics and social issues seriously, but our academics no less so.

The Revolutionary (1970)

Revolutionary's progress (general, not specific, spoiler)

[8/10 · 23 May 2007]

Although I haven't seen this film since it first came out, I remember it as about the only worthwhile one out of a spate of student-radical films (_The Strawberry Statement_, _R.P.M._, the horrible _Getting Straight_) of the time.

The novel and film chronicle the evolution, or devolution, of a well-meaning student trying to fight against a corrupt society that practices a form of "repressive tolerance." He moves from one form of protest to another, finding defeat and frustration each time, and escalating his militancy in the hopes of making a difference next time. It reflects (without answering) the ends-vs-means issues that many progressive people, especially students, struggled with at the time, trying to find the right way to change a clearly unjust society--demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, getting guns like the Black Panthers, preparing explosives like The Weathermen, kidnapping people like the Front de libération du Québec, assassinating them like the Red Army Faction, or just dropping out like the hippies.

Like Robert Duvall, who also appears in this film, Voight is a true actor, different in every film, rather than a recurring character, like, say, Robert Redford or John Wayne. As I recall, Voight carries his young confusions and good intentions in a very convincing way. The washed-out colour of the film do a good job of reflecting the bleakness of the (unidentified) repressive society.