"You have my word as an inveterate cheat" - WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)

With the way Woody Allen's sexual neurosis has gone into a deep WASP-y freeze these past decades, it's easy to forget his 60's pro-libido worldview and that old carefree magic that used to show us the winking trickster behind his neurotic fussing: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, SLEEPER, BANANAS and PLAY IT AGAIN SAM, in fact everything he wrote before his break-out, STAR WARS-beating-for-the-Oscar success, ANNIE HALL. His Humbert-ish yens and ectomorph satyriasis provided an exhilarating freshness that was part of the sexual revolution. His nebbishy persona doesn't exclude him from the in-crowd of that era, so he's not as threatened by the competition for the WASP chicks with O'Toole a few successes down the road. But in PUSSYCAT he's not competing against O'Toole, he's writing for him. And he even gives the leg-humping lion share to a second Brit, Peter Sellers, and working as one and with a bevy of hot talented comediennes the film rises like a balloon way past the clumsy boudoir farce of types like Blake Edwards, who always seemed too easily hypnotized by a pretty shape with less of an idea how to film it, preferring to hang out in raincoat drag clubs with Oktoberfest grotesques.

But British directors Clive Donner and Robert Talmadge seem to know enough to just get out of the way, like you would for the Marx Brothers. In a great extended scene, Fritz and O'Toole get drunk together in a Paris cafe, half-fighting, then apologizing, then taking off their coats to slug it out, then forgetting why they took their coats off, before staggering over to Capucine's baroque apartment tower, arm and arm, to lob rocks and slurred declarations of love up to her balcony: "Tell her her face is like ze pale autumn moon!" beseeches Sellers. "I'm not going to say that," Toole slurs. "It's ghastly!" Drunken recitations from Hamlet are tossed instead to indicate the Immoral Bard is with them, and O'Toole playing a drunk doing Hamlet is about the best Hamlet or O'Toole can be. And Sellers' ridiculous black wig makes sense when he pops up as Richard III in a dream sequence (he apparently loved the wig so much he wore it all through the shoot). I love O'Toole here even more than in MY FAVORITE YEAR, and in some ways if you factor in the Allen worked in the Borscht Belt gag room of Your Show of Shows then you realize PUSSY might even be a prequel to YEAR, from an era smoother, bawdier epoch, before sex was relegated to foul-mouthed 17 year-old virgins.

But while MY FAVORITE YEAR was fun and O'Toole played a drunken old buccaneer well, it doesn't hold up well. It has terribly unimaginative lighting and scoring, and its reliance on a barrage of ethnic humor, nebbishy voice-overs, and 'oh how zany' old saws like stealing the police horse in Central Park at dawn are way too forced and cliche. But in PUSSYCAT there's real madness in the air and O'Toole has the energetic languor of a man who's been laughing a lot in between takes and is grateful to be having such clever lines, and so many pretty girls to woo, and he shows his gratitude by giving the material a depth of actorly resonance most dramatic stars playing comedy wouldn't bother with. When he brings cricket ball and bat to his insane group therapy meeting it feels like he's sharing something with these new friends that have been making his sides hurt from laughing all month. It's beautiful.

O'Toole plays a charmer so irresistible to women and so unable to resist them that his life has been one long series of one-night stands with one of his more insistent conquests, played by Schneider, demanding he marry her. He loves her so he tries to comply so goes to see a psychiatrist, Fritz (Sellers), to help him with what we'd now call sex addiction (and we'd now be compelled to say, "There's nothing funny about it!" in case a sanctimonious but cute girl is listening). Meanwhile, Woody shows up as Victor, a nervous stripper's aid who somehow winds up taking Romy Schneider home to his little pad --her act of reprisal against O'Toole's waffling, the way Miriam Hopkins was always going off with Edward Everett Horton.

PUSSYCAT began as a Warren Beatty vehicle apparently which makes sense, but it would have been a completely different film, nowhere near as fun. We'd just hate Beatty for managing to bed all these girls and still look tan and nonplussed. We can't hate O'Toole because his pallor is that of a man taking too much Cialis. And scoring loads of babes seems so critical to Beatty's self-esteem that it's not fun, just compulsive. O'Toole just genuinely seems too enraptured by the beauty and sparke. Each broad takes just a bit of his bodily fluids, and each takes him farther from being able to look his fiancee in the eye, but he's so enamored by each new girl, and so appreciative of their attention that each time is like the first. As he struggles valiantly against his inner nature, women are literally dropping out of the skies into his motorcar. What's a nobly drunk insouciant to do?

That's the joy of it all, we'd do just what he's doing, except maybe not try so hard to keep Schneider... though her parents turn out to be pretty fun at a party. Another genius rarity! You know those affairs where you stick it out an extra year because you like drinking with her parents!? You don't? O monsieur! And another thing that hasn't happened in 1965 (aside from AIDS, of course), that grisly story of what too much sex did to Three Dog Night's Danny Hutton. As far as we knew, there could never be too much sex. Oh man, to have Cialis for daily use, but as yet no AIDS? Can you imagine?

Naturally Allen's script is going to lean at some point towards his beloved Fellini, via a image of O'Toole with whip and slouch hat as women fight over him in a dream, but I always got the impression Fellini was too guilty Catholic to really go for it rather than run home at the last minute hyperventilating like Marcello's provincial papa in LA DOLCE VITA. O'Toole's women on the other hand are all believable conquests and his befuddled sense of crushing over-stimulation conveys what it feels like when every girl in the room is fighting over you and then they go home with someone else and suddenly no one wants you and you're suddenly tossed away in the street for twenty years, alone and wondering what you did wrong, like the Jeff Beck guitar neck in BLOW-Up or Donna's rain cake. O'Toole has that weakened look of a man who's been fought over enough that he barely notices.

from top: Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss

Then there's the women: Ursula Andress ("She's a personal friend of James Bond!" Fritz shouts) has seldom been more alluring as a mark-missing skydiver who lands in O'Toole's roadster en route to le Chateau Chantal, where the cast is assembling for the final, inevitable closet-hopping merry-go-round, along with Paula Prentiss, aces as a manic stripper-poetess ("Who killed Charlie Parker? You did!") working on her fifth nervous breakdown / pill OD (the detox ward later presents her with a commemorative plaque). Capucine is a sexy bundle of nymphotic repression and I love her to death, so why pick Romy Schneider's pussycat over all those meaningless... gorgeous.... succulent... crazy other pussycats? She's cute and can be vivacious but ends up with the one-note monogamy-hawker part; she even thinks she's being cute when she steals his car keys and won't give them back. And you know how she ended up --all but wrapped in collector's non-acidic mylar by Jacques Dutronc in The Important thing is to Love. (1975).
 

But what's important is that Woody doesn't really believe either notion - monogamy or nymphomania - is the answer, but he's having fun being funny rather than Artsy. Writing a character like O'Toole's sex addict seems to help this young version of Allen's pen live large: the sex is fun and easy and breezy, not the cranky old bourgeois intellectual renting a prostitute sex of his future films. O'Toole's tall lanky Britishness gives Allen permission to do things at a literally Wagnerian pitch. His pen's libido seems charged with that exhilaration that only comes when a non-Catholic writes farce in France, to the point that even when O'Toole starts tenderly yammering about how his true love was right in front of him all the while and his own back yard and love is where you left it and so forth, a big author's message sign flashes on... and on. Man, that author's message sign could be flashing nonstop in the last dozen films Woody's made!

That's fine because, marriage-minded women or no, there's some of that giddy thrill of when you're 'on a roll' and women start fighting over you, or you just get lucky and for once aren't saying idiotic things and blowing your chances, and actually getting a bottle, a bed, and a girl together all at the same time and life is a jazzy gas. Even if poor Allen's character spazzes and Sellers is basically trying to date rape Capucine all through the film, why not forgive it? And if you have laughter, it doesn't even matter if you end up with nothing else. Just look at those crazy actors in this picture below. They're having a blast, and why not?

So instead of getting upset just think about the way young woman all claim they're helpless nymphomaniacs to a man and then refuse his advances a second later, and all the other things that have disappeared from films due to PC ethos. There was once upon a time a book called "The Joy of Sex" that was on every adult's bookshelf --even in suburbia. Nowadays there wouldn't be a book like that, now it would be The "Joy" of Responsibility - where even porn stars are required to use aesthetically depressing condoms and there are enough lectures about the importance of family values and settling down in every romcom to turn off even a moralistic lecturer like the post-code MGM. But with PUSSYCAT we don't have to worry about that. Here, everything is always 1965 and no woman runs who doesn't secretly want to be chased, and even the cross fades are psychedelic, and the perfume of giddy madness eliminates any staleness in the boudoir-farcical air. Whoa whoa whoa Whoa! Whoa.

PS - And just when you think it can't get any better? Francoise Hardy. Now there's a French actress I'd have given up my low-down tomcat ways for, and all she'd have to do is sing "La Chazz l'infantile."

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Sandahl Bergman Vs. the Helots: SHE (1982)

I don't care what the haters say, BATTLESHIP (2012) is awesome. Maybe it's because I stayed home sick the day I saw it, so was both more relaxed and delirious than usual, or because I had a tolerance for the awesomely named Taylor Kitsch but I haven't seen a junk film with a greater sense of how to rock this cocktiquely since GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA (my praise here). But I didn't come to talk about expensive junk cinema. I'm here to talk about SHE. Not the 1935 SHE starring Randolph Scott as a dull Arctic explorer resisting the alleged charms of a future Nixon opponent named Helen Gahagan and I don't mean the Hammer SHE starring a genuinely charm-packed Ursula Andress dealing with a flock of snooty Brit interlopers. I mean the Italian 1982 (1985 in America) SHE, the one you've probably drifted past a dozen times on Netflix's streaming list, with poor Sandahl looking up from a dingy corner of the cover, clad in brown calfskin, as if pleading to be helicoptered into a better film. Well, drift past no more! The helicopter stops here. This is the SHE for me.

Like BATTLESHIP, SHE is a great mishmash of styles and eras, a post-apocalyptic post-modern meltdown of leftover World War Two ordinance, a lavish and modern producer's mansion play room and various swaths of backyard wasteland. Anachronistic sights include a bunch of youthful aesthetes listening to an old-fashioned gramophone and having a big Roman orgy, then waking up in the middle of the night with plastic fangs to eat their guests; a swimming pool with beach balls, swords, women in cages, a giant in a tutu and feather boa, flagellants, fog machines, robots, human bird cages, tuxedos, gladiatorial combat, great dialogue:

Shandra: "This doesn't make sense"

Aisha: "Shandra, this has nothing to do with sense."

I know I'm not alone in my "appreciation" for SHE. On the trenchant lurple.com, DF Dresden says: "Like me, you’ll be wondering how much LSD was dropped during the writing of this cheap, crazy post apocalyptic production.’"

Indeed, for in addition to its borrowings from just about every corner of the prop department, SHE has a countercultural vibe that recalls another post-apocalyptic sci fi film, GAS-S-S-S (1971), it was the last thing Roger Corman directed before he left AIP to form New World, which later produced a bucketload of films like SHE in the wake of CONAN's success, all with a nicely deadpan hip tone, including DEATHSTALKER (above) and DEATHSTALKER 2, both great for late night "wait, did he really just say that?" kind of moments with Robotripper friends. And there's hot chicks from the era before plastic 'enhancements' turned every New World rack the same, if you'll forgive the impression.

What SHE of course lacks that GAS-S-s-S had in spades are long stretches of music by Country Joe and the Fish, but that's a good thing. Instead there's Motörhead and lots of fuzzed-out Rick Wakeman synths.  GAS-S-s-S would make a good double bill with SHE, though, and Godard's WEEKEND (1967). All three have that episodic anachronistic structure, where heroes wander the post-apocalyptic landscape encountering various seriocomic factions and anachronistic historical characters they must battle or get held prisoner by, or fall in love with, terrorized or tortured by, or lectured to by... about communism.

 

The thing is, we know Corman's funny, clever, hip and Godard is all those things and more, but the makers of SHE are an unknown quantity. GAS-S-S-S has Edgar Allen Poe on a chopper, referencing Corman's biker films and Poe films in a image, but SHE has a sailor-suit wearing bridge guard with an eye patch, yellow bandana, and the word 'Texas' written on his forehead, doing impressions of (I wrote them all down, impressed and aghast): Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, Popeye, Mortimer Snerd, Adolph Hitler, Walter Winchell, Jackie Mason, Harry Von Zell, Senator Cleghorn (from the Fred Allen Show!), James Cagney, the Black Knight (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail!), and of course a whole chorus line, because he keeps multiplying. Oh yeah, and he sings a snatch of the theme from "Green Acres." And he looks like Paul Thomas in stage hair.

"Great" as all that is, without Bergman, wearing an array of sexy and cool costumes, showing off all the sword skills she learned for CONAN and generally making you sometimes believe she's in a better movie. As I wrote in my praise of CONAN, she was the love of my adolescent life, and if you were like me then--a Bergman fan who made super 8mm CONAN-inspired movies very similar in found object aesthetic to SHE--then it's SHE you I will. That's a Yoda impression. Where are you going?!

SHE came out in Italy the same year as CONAN did, which on its own shows you 1) no one makes imitations of successful films faster than the Italians, and 2) There's no real 'market' for excellent dancers in genre movies, and 3) Bergman's typecasting as a sword and sandal type served her in rapidly diminishing returns. But even diminished she shines. Heroines like Xena, Buffy, and Beatrix Kiddo today just get stunt woman Zoe Bell to do their more dangerous work, but Bergman did all her own fighting in CONAN, and it made a huge difference --and Bergman snakes through the whole film with such a lithe grace that we get mighty, mighty mad when she's killed. The vengeance is sweet in the way it seldom is when normal girls die in the most prefunctory of revenge excuse scenarios. To see her so quickly typecast and forgotten as someone who doesn't really have a future outside of the 80s sword and sorcery bubble is just tragic. Oh Sandahl, why why WHY did you choose to play the boring villainness Queen Gedren instead of the (also boring, but more active) lead in RED SONJA? Was this your version of Lugosi refusing to do FRANKENSTEIN and thus forever marking him in producer's secret ledgers as 'obstinate' and ensuring a long downward spiral of crappy parts in crappy pictures? You left that movie like a snake without a head.

On the other hand, SHE is world's better than RED SONJA (1985), no matter which role Bergman would have played. SHE's sense of agape jaw aesthetic arrest is helped not hurt by the backyard junk post-apocalypse post -modern cheapness. The relatively big budgeted ($18M) Richard Fleischer-directed RED SONJA on the other hand is unwatchable no matter what your viewer context.

For example, consider the helot. I'm referring of course to Frank Capra's MEET JOHN DOE and Walter Brennan's rant about the helots when trying to convince Gary Cooper to give away the fifty dollar bill he's received. As you read the upcoming quote (spoken with great gumption by old Walter), imagine he's talking about the freedom of making a low budget no-CGI early 80s Brechtian free-for-all like SHE , vs. enduring the producer interference and studio pressures that come with all the millions it takes to craft bigger budgeted junk action movies out today, like TRANSFORMERS or THE AVENGERS or MCGRUBER:

"All right. You're walking along, not a nickel in your jeans, your free as the wind, nobody bothers ya. Hundreds of people pass you by in every line of business: shoes, hats, automobiles, radios, everything, and there all nice lovable people and they lets you alone, is that right? Then you get a hold of some dough and what happens, all those nice sweet lovable people become helots, a lotta heels. They begin to creep up on ya, trying to sell ya something: they get long claws and they get a stranglehold on ya, and you squirm and you duck and you holler and you try to push them away but you haven't got the chance. They gots ya. First thing ya know you own things, a car for instance, now your whole life is messed up with a lot more stuff: you get license fees and number plates and gas and oil and taxes and insurance and identification cards and letters and bills and flat tires and dents and traffic tickets and motorcycle cops and tickets and courtrooms and lawyers and fines and... a million and one other things. What happens? You're not the free and happy guy you used to be. You need to have money to pay for all those things, so you go after what the other fellas got. There you are, you're a helot yourself."

Were SHE made today it would no doubt have endless CGI dragons and some fresh-out-of-helot-school rich man's son producer who would insist director Avi Nesher pick an aesthetic - make it ancient or post-apocalyptic, but not this weird limbo where WW2, hippie counterculture, the Inquisition, and ancient Rome all live side by side. But it was made 1982 (the height of my own post-apocalyptic barbarian moviemaking career) and so the tactile delights of using actual props and monster makeup are just baller enough to steer SHE into the timeless, anti-establishment, no-CGI forbidden zone where films which kill careers and get no love anywhere are suddenly aged into anti-helot relevance. With an American star, Israeli director and mostly Italian crew, SHE is one of those rare international productions that turns its tower of Babel culture-drain into an advantage. When your movie is going in six different directions at once, don't reign it all in, shoot for twelve more!

On that note you might make an all night anti-Helot Netflix stream festival with Nesher's SHE as the middle feature between GAS-S-S-S and the amazing Caroline Munro-starring sci fi (Italian Star Wars ripoff) STARCRASH (1979), and top it all off with a GHOSTS OF MARS or THE WARRIORS chaser, and at last you will know that the aesthetic of super 8mm backyard cinema lives on, as Big Daddy Mars, or a Baseball Fury, or a Joe Spinell, or any other kind of gaudy patter-spewing, scary make-up sporting thug ensemble...so don't fuck around with us Nork, and keep your pecker dry and the world will turn, turn away from the sterile, helot incarnate W.S. Anderson GGI action film (ala RESIDENT EVIL)  into a post-modern/apocalyptic thrift store prop wasteland.

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Bouncer at the Gates of Love: REVOLUTION (1968)

"What we're seeing is a basic change in the evolutionary progress of mankind - something only priests and monks were into until a very long time ago, and that is consciousness expansion." 

So notes an unnamed head in Jack O'Connell's REVOLUTION (1968), a crazy, narrator-free documentary about the Haight Ashbury community that still glimmers with a bid of LSD sparkle even today. And he's right. The evolutionary progress of man was changed, two steps forward and in 1968 we were yet to start stumbling back.

It's hard to imagine a moment remotely similar in the history of the human race to 1967:. LSD was still legal and becoming hugely popular, as much a middle class rage as Twitter is now, changing an entire age demographic from self-absorbed mopes into free-spirited truth seekers (Twitter would be perhaps vice versa). And not only the young kids but adventurous parents were jumping into the fire and disappearing from the 9-5 fidelity-minded spousal system. Kids began to grow up in communes instead of two car garages; LSD was everywhere--in clinical psychiatrist offices, research, and middle American homes. Owsley gave out thousands of pure 'purples' from which "Purple Haze" gets its name as free samples at Monterey Pop.

Radical new paradigms could be soaked up very easily on acid. Evolution sped up on psychedelics. It was pretty 'hip' to at least have tried LSD even if just so you might have some actual insight into the hippie movement before you condemned their lifestyle. Having tried it made you cool, like skydiving or bungee jumping in the 1980s, or ecstasy in he 90s.

The always insightful Flickhead writes:

In the free spirit of the times, O’Connell doesn’t bother with conventions like linear construction or identifying subtitles. Themes and locations shift at whim, interview subjects go unidentified. Anonymous faces provide scant commentary on David Smith’s Free Clinic, and The Diggers’ Free Store and free food program, both deserving more time and respect. As does the mystery existentialist envisioning a cash-free future run by computers necessitating the need for a pot-smoking leisure class. But these shortcomings don’t diminish some otherwise perceptive passages in Revolution, the most nostalgic of which concern the reach for a communal utopia, one the counterculture — countering greed, materialism, superficiality — believed would erase ego from the equation, to render the desire for personal reward obsolete…  (cont.)

Damn right, Flickhead. What the fuck happened to the pursuit of egolessness? Backed by music by the Steve Miller Band (freshly formed), Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, we get some ideas of how to pick up the egoless thread. The crunchy psychedelic guitars are a most welcome presence in one's living room (dig, the "living"... room) even if you're not paying full attention to the kids onscreen or the squares gawking from the sidelines at the never-ending parade  of panhandlers along the Haight.

Whoa man. I'm totally tripping after seeing it. Pupils dilated in the mirror. 20-years old and foxy, dancing like a girl who just found freedom, who done stepped out her shell like... a girl named... Today.

No man, that's like her name. She changed her name to Today, because that's all we have, that's everything there is. Her big LSD trip--captured by O'Connell from start to finish--anchors the whole second half of the film: she begs for change in a really attractive, clean looking brown and light green poncho; she climbs trees and frolics in the park; she drives up the coast to dig the old growth; there's more squiggly light shows. Flowers! Flowers! She strokes an apple --it's breathing! Someone eats a banana. Some dude paints some crazy colors. She lies in the grass with two girlfriends, giggling hysterically. Even with the 21st century's roseless, untinted glasses you can feel her whole body sigh with relief as socio-genetic programming is short-circuited and overcome with a single white pill and good set and setting.

Unfolding with one eye on the exploitation market, it could be argued REVOLUTION was--at least on some level--pitched less at the kids themselves and more at adults curious about all the free love, as in the lengthy naked dance light show to Country Joe and the Fish's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 43" (below), but prurience is addressed too: hippies interviewed include a girl from the Sexual Freedom League who explains how only couples are allowed into the orgy to keep the numbers even (so dirty old men don't capsize the boat). Ah the logistics of orgy-mongering!

As someone who's done decades of grieving for the loss of the countercultural revolutionary dream, I've always had a resolved hatred for male sexual aggression. You can't have a free utopia with members who are obsessed with sex. It's like over-eating - dude, once you have some sex, move on. But America's trained men to be hungry ghosts when it comes to sex -- I guess you need to have a lot of it before you can see the forest for the trees. Look at Siddhartha! Or Mick Jagger! But that doesn't make it any less of an issue.  No one wants to sleep with these ugly raincoat pervs, so the pervy aspect remains.

The peak moment in all this is the writhing naked theater group dancing in front of the wild psychedelic light show to Country Joe's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 42." With one eye to the bush shots, the long takes with the light show definitely have a certain magic Kenneth Anger-style power. You can feel the amount of LSD that surged through the audience, as if the black magick strength of their lysergic gaze is captured in the celluloid itself! Hey, acid is grooovy.

Decades later watching all this on our laptops we can either grin cynically at all the naive spiritual tomfoolery or we can cry in thinking what we lost. The counterculture failed, or maybe it didn't. I used to argue this point with my guitarist all the time. He said no, the counterculture was alive, it had been integrated--driven underground perhaps--but all the stronger for being more exclusive. I argued that we failed, but now of course I'm in AA and my guitarist's in Ibiza with jet-set supermodels, so there you go.

REVOLUTION keeps up the even-keeled in its discussion, even into the thick of the tripping, interviewing cocktail hour executive types relaying the pre-trip adult opinion, cops, and hospital doctors who deal with the bad trip freak-outs. Many of the adults think the  hippies are just slumming middle class college dropouts. Change the world through love and spiritual union if you can--power to the flower!--but damn get a job or stop using public bathrooms to wash your sandals! The rest of us work to pay taxes so those bathrooms can stay clean --that's the adult's message. The doctor talks about LSD casualties in the hospital, as if it's the drug's fault and not the hospital's! I wanted to scream at the screen: "Bro! the people who brought these poor kids to your gleaming white sanitary gulag are the problem. A tripping person has no place in a hospital - they belong in the garden, with the sunflowers, or on the roof deck, sunbathing in their body paint and funny hats. Being strapped in a hospital straitjacket is no way to come out of a downward spiral. Blame the youth again for though they don't pay taxes or acknowledge the relevance of the establishment, the minute something goes wrong on their acid trips they demand the hospital take their twitching friend off their hands.

Another interesting moment comes when a hippie leader (the one discussed by Flickhead above) discusses the rise of "cybernation," or the increased use of computers, resulting in something called: "massive compulsory leisure." The realization that "this job could be better done by a machine" becomes the prelude to dropping out: "Many, I think, need to learn to do nothing."

He also thinks "LSD should be used to reveal the divine, it's no accident that it entered the world right at the time nuclear fission did." He adds, "If you deny yourself access to that kind of experience, to that kind of energy, then you are simply a fool!" Word, brother. But what about if you continue to take it, over and over, every day, until you're a gibbering mess sitting in a puddle behind the stage at a Phish show? Don't say it can't happen.

I remember feeling all lysergically connected to this kind of youthful hippie revolutionary moment, back in 1987 when I lucked into an instant loving relationship with my future bandmates and a cadre of beautiful, brilliant, blazing hippie chicks, and I feel deeply sorry for kids who many not have had such a 'trip,' - it truly changed my life forever. But after awhile I realized LSD was like reading the same travel brochure over and over. Eventually you have to try and get there, like, permanently, the hard way, via meditation and good deeds, and AA meetings. My gorgeous Connecticut hippies got married and had mutant kids and I got sober and then stopped going to AA and now I white knuckle in an antisocial rapture like Max Von Sydow in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. The revolution never quite happened for me, no matter how many trips I took. "But we have the music," and the hopes for a next generation of snotty youth to latch onto something bigger than themselves even if the adults tell them its dangerous.

Hopefully, this time, they'll figure out a way to shut out the pervs, tourists, and freeloaders who inevitably cohere around such a righteous fire like metal shavings to a beautiful magnet.

That's the ultimate problem with utopias... to really do them right you need to have brutal ways to keep the scum out of the garden - or you need to keep evolving so fast the losers can't catch up. Exclusivity and a high vantage point are needed, as is a bouncer, a gate-keeper, otherwise, forget it. And if you need a gate-keeper, what kind of utopia is that? It may look a lot like 2012.

There was sequel made to check up on Today Malone and see where those hippies are now, it's called THE HIPPIE REVOLUTION, from 1996. Avoid it! Who wants to see a flower child get old? If you must witness such tragedy, check out my tale of time traveling psychedelic gumshoes and the desire to return to that high water mark when LSD almost changed the entire world overnight for the better -- HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET.



Not available on DVD but 'out there' if you know where to look--like everything, man, it streams, dig?--REVOLUTION is from a different time, one where the word "revolution" hadn't been co-opted by the media to sell shows. I bet now even the word 'revolution' is trademarked by The Beatles-Macintosh Inc. What can you do about it? Capitalism controls the very words out of our mouths. No way to fight it, that's what we say today, no way to stop the corporate leeches. They're already in our bloodstream. But the hippies didn't know that, and in 1967-8 they did something about it, until they got sleepy, and strung out. And they forgot what they were supposed to be fighting against. And needed to go home and get money from their corporate dads so they could buy Dead tickets and red feather boas. This is their story

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Fourteen or Fight! WILD IN THE STREETS (1968)

In today's environ of political stagnancy we may no longer remember how it could even be possible, but between 1967 and '70, the establishment was seriously concerned about being overrun by its own children. The suits were scared, the politicians saw the size of the crowds at Woodstock, the small cities worth of people who would appear within a week of some rock star announcing a free concert, and they knew no army could stand in their way. And we have WILD IN THE STREETS to prove it. This is the film that made good on the ever-looming urban myth, that the hippies wanted to spike the water supply with LSD, lower the voting age (the age to vote didn't get lowered to 18 until 1971), and send everyone over 30 off to camps for 're-grooving' (1). The only old guy in the film is the original Ed Begley as a youth-hating politician advising California senator Hal Holbrook not to make a deal with the devil, or a young rock star, in this case Max Frost (Christopher Jones, who looks like James Dean's reincarnation times Martin Sheen).

Max is handsome and charismatic, and has a fine drummer in Richard Pryor; Kevin Coughlin is his 14 year-old queer super genius accountant and guitar player; Diane Varsi is the ex-child star resident free spirit. Shelly Winters is the broad comic mom and her schtick has not aged well. Songs include "Shape of Things to Come," which was a real-life hit. There's also "We're 52%"  and "Fourteen or Fight!" both encouraging youth to go on a rampage if the voting age isn't lowered. Eventually it is: Frost is elected prez, baby and the organized jihad against the older generation begins in earnest.

What's interesting is that this film came out a year before Woodstock and Altamont, but it's already prefigured in "the biggest block party in history" that narrator Paul Frees calls Frost's Sunset Strip demonstration. Frees also adds that the older "people die of shock just watching TV." Oh if only, man, if only.  The songs were written by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann who wrote songs in the following year's ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO, which would have been more of a hit had the whole charismatic hippy cult leader thing not have suddenly gotten a terrible rap thanks to the Manson murders (WILD would probably have been pulled from release had it come out a year later).

But that was then, let's focus up on 1968, the year this film came out, hitting a nice little nerve during a very turbulent and hopeful time. Up until this point in history the youth had a pretty serious voice, especially on campus, where they regularly made local and even national news protesting and holding sit-ins. It was the year that battles against sexism, racism, censorship, and sexual taboos raged and groups like the Rolling Stones could gather hundreds of thousands at the drop of a hat, and no cop on earth could make them disperse. If they wanted, these bands could start a real revolution with their long hair and their rock music.

But the fear that they would has soon evaporated, overdoses and ennui saw to that. In the end it's really all about Altamont and the fearful way Melvin Belli and assorted city planners are forced to accommodate the crowds and not the other way around. You can feel the unease as the old powers bow to the whims of the young in GIMME SHELTER. And the way the wild anarchy of druggie California weirdness in turn overwhelms the music itself.

On that note, it's to the credit of TV director Barry Shear that he can depict Max's massive shows of youth revolt via tinted stock footage of the Sunset Strip, a bonfire, parked motorcycles, stalled traffic, random shots of crowds dancing, tinted windows, blinking signs, other rock concert and earlier love-in crowds, skylines, and the Capital Building. In other words, nary a farthing spent on crowd scenes. An assortment of faces from the counterculture come and go, as is their wont: Bobby Sherman, Peter Tork, Gary Busey. As with most AIPs, there's less than a dozen people in the whole movie but if you're drunk or ten years-old it can seem like the most dangerous, expensive movie in the world.

Writer Robert Thom based the script on his short story, "The Day it all Happened, Baby." Thom wrote a lot of films about overbearing moms and their beautiful Apollonian sons, like CULT OF THE DAMNED (the mom sleeps with the rock star boyfriend of her heavy daughter), BLOODY MAMA (Mama sleeps with her son's gay lover, Bruce Dern), DEATHRACE 2000 (son runs over old lady), LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE (snide old lady gossip columnist hounds Byronic filmmaker) etc. Thom was born in 1929, so you do the math, he was old, daddy, old. Pushin' 40 when this film was made, this film with its groovy finger on the supple ribs of beautiful youth. In other words it's got Sebastian Venable fingerprints all over its subtexts. Come to think of it, has Robert Thom ever written a straight love scene? Like a genuine no-nonsense straight people being genuinely romantic kind of trip? Oh wow... no, there's no sex in WILD IN THE STREETS, and the one moment of intimacy comes with Jones and another boy. Oh Thom. As Diane Varsi notes with a smile, "methinks you boys are fags."

That's all good though, and awesome. There's also plenty of psychedelic light show madness and teeny bopper blonde hair. That said, the music still has traces of AIP's patented corniness; lazy horn sections remind you that the older generation making the film harbor unconscious resentment for their drive-in demographic. Shelly Winters eventually has to bow and gurgle to please them, and methinks we're meant to feel bad for her, or America. But America has always thrived on dissent. Sometimes the greatest patriots are those who would elect a mentally unstable sociopath "just to see what would happen." (you know who I mean).

After WILD was over, I turned cable back on and there was this show on History Channel about '69 - The Sexual Revolution' and Hugh Hefner talking about how he and Shel Silverstein appreciated the free love movement more than the youth because they--he and Shel--had grown up in a more conservative time. And I thought, like wow, dig, my generation is living the exact reverse!! I saw enough of it growing up in the 1970s that I've come to feel I'll never--no matter how debauched I become--ever live that free again, and the younger kids are threatened not by my moral rigidity, but my lack thereof; my preaching of a time before safety, health, environmentalism, and antidepressants (which are a lot like the daily LSD supplements in the re-grooving camps set up by Max). WILD IN THE STREETS reflects a time when the idea of freedom and the banners of sex, drugs, and rock and roll had permanently (we thought) done away with the nanny state Safety First Clydes and Anita Bryants, or at least reduced them to powerless Shelly Winters caricatures. But our nation is nothing if not bi-polar, half terrified family man, half crazed druggie biker.

That's the beauty of America - when you're always fighting yourself, you just can't lose.

NOTES
1) Firesign Theater - Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him

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Acid's Greatest Shorts: WAIKIKI WABBIT (1943)

That hair-raising hare, Bugs Bunny, is second only to Ms. Betty Boop in terms of psychedelic savvy, and of all the Bugs cartoons, few are quite as gone, daddy, gone as this psychedelic little 1943 masterpiece from Warner Brothers, WAIKIKI WABBIT.

I always had issues with this one just because the unlike Elmer Fudd who hunts only for pweasua these two dolts are starving to death. I empathize. That's my curse, so I need a rationalization to cheer their humiliation, luckily there are several such as when Bugs hands them a fully cooked chicken and rather than attack it they get all cocky and set the table, even singing a round of "We're gonna have roast rabbit!" like bratty schoolchildren. And there's the issue of the carrots. Why can't they just eat carrots like our long-eared protagonist? They must grow on Waikiki or else where did Bugs get his? In summation: the stakes are much higher here than with Elmer and his hunting wicense, and the savage Brechtian truth of "mankind is kept alive by bestial acts" has seldom been more poignantly illustrated.

The backgrounds are uncommonly surreal: psychedelic splashes of purple, red and yellow signifying foliage in the mind of a delirious, slowly dying castaway. Among the angry Kali-esque visions from the preliminary bardos: Bugs' po-faced tribal dance and a headless, cooked chicken rising from its plate like an avenging angel of commercial produce to confront our castaways for their carnivore callousness.

Meat can be a gross proposition when you're tripping: you taste the ghost of your steak's dying mammal screams in every naked bite, while at the same time you're probably dehydrated and hungry all ready and it's long past dinner, and probably even breakfast. So WAIKIKI WABBIT is there for you, guiding you gently towards vegetarian options even as it depicts life as a brutal prison of unending hunger and delirium, with the figure of Bugs as the last-laugh-having Kali avenger of the hunted and farm-raised animal. So either shed civilization's cocky coat of entitlement and learn to just bite down on anything you can grab without bothering to sing and set the table first, or even better grab a carrot and follow Bugs down the rabbit hole of veganism  before the next burger you eat turns out to be your own juicy, glowing knee!

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