Getting Straight

This would-be Zeitgeist satire is a well-meaning attempt to address the changing times of the late ‘60s but has none of the flair and sophistication of Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967) or the worldliness of his Carnal Knowledge (1971). Rather, it is it a wordy and overlong inventory of contemporary hot topics like student/black power, Vietnam, “turning on” and dropping out,  sexual permissiveness and so on. all wrapped up in an unfocussed, unconvincing package which churns through its story before coming to a big dramatic crescendo and petering out with a cheesy finale.

Set on a college campus against the background of a student rebellion, Elliot Gould plays Harry Bailey, a mature-aged student and former drop-out who, sick of his penurious life has returned to college in order to “go straight” in the “real” world.  Despite as a pioneer activist (he was at Selma in 1965) scorning the sloganeering of white middle-class college kids he still has enough anti-establishmentarianism to be hostile to the college hierarchy which he wants to join. As a result he is caught between the two poles, identifying and rejecting both in equal measure.  His relationship with his girlfriend, Jan (Candice Bergen), is entirely symptomatic of his mixed emotions.The film recounts the steps along the way to Harry's moral re-awakening (and familiar reward).

As they say, it not what you say, it’s how you say it and here it’s not very well said, as the film jumps around from issue to issue with expositional diligence, periodically leavening the program with bouts of Harry and Jan’s vexed relationship (Harry scorns her yearnings for suburban security but he still expects her to do his laundry). Bergen with her mass of perfectly groomed blond hair often framed face-on by Laszlo Kovacs’s camera is like no kind of college student you’ve known, let alone a mixed up student activist. Gould as a cynically witty smartass with a ready turn of phrase or literary allusion is no more convincing a character although he is serviceably entertaining.

One can imagine this having some purchase in its day for its political correctness (it was released almost simultaneously with the Kent State University shootings) but wanting in any other merits it is now purely of historical interest. 

FYI: The film gave Harrison Ford his first significant screen appearance.

 

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