|
The source is Horse Feathers, down to Elliott Gould's unkempt update of the Groucho mustache. "For the last time, stop trying to inject morality and ethics and sociology into the teaching of English grammar!" Academia and the movement, the dropout drops back in for his degree, too young for fellow professors and too old for protesting students. His gal (Candice Bergen) has no issue with suburban tinsel, his pal (Robert F. Lyons) is a pothead with a bit of trouble dodging the draft. A vet of Vietnam and Selma, a maverick in his own mind and a blowhard in everybody else's, Gould at his most iconically abrasive. "Now remember, anybody over 30 is the enemy." Richard Rush's rollicking companion piece to his own Psych-Out, a zeitgeist snapshot wound around the Mark Twain joke about not letting schooling interfere with your education. Locked out by his landlady and on foot after his jalopy goes up in smoke, the protagonist seeks a place to crash and stumbles into the opening of Zabriskie Point, with Max Julien and Jeannie Berlin in pugnacious debate. "If you didn't want them to think, you shouldn't have given them library cards!" A certain affinity with Bastille stormers, Cervantes recognized in comic-books, literary greats ranked on postcoital sheets. Cecil Kellaway as the benign face of classical Hollywood, Harrison Ford on the margins for the nervous New Wave. Rack focus re-imagines champ contre champ, long lenses ponder concrete campus architecture rattled by swirls of bodies, batons and tear gas. "And that's the difference between syntax and, uh, whatever it is, meaning." An interpretation of The Great Gatsby triggers the crackup, and a decade later there's Russell's Altered States. With Jeff Corey, Jon Lormer, Leonard Stone, William Bramley, John Rubinstein, Richard Anders, Gregory Sierra, Jenny Sullivan, and Brenda Sykes.
--- Fernando F. Croce |