In the Windmills of SKIDOO (1968)

"it is part of you - you are part of it.
Remember the final reality - 

the all good, the all peaceful, the light, the radiant - 

let mind and body separate." 

Dig, man. Dig.

Jackie Gleason took acid. It's common knowledge, not that his acting gives you much indication. But thanks to a lifelong interest in aliens and a friendship with Nixon, he maybe saw some things so harrowing that the worst acid could dish out was as rum raisin instead of whiskey a-cocoa. By which I mean genuinely alien dead bodies. UFO author Jim Mars has the story:

According to Gleason's second wife, Beverly McKittrick, (Jackie) returned home visibly shaken one night in 1973. Gleason, who was known to have an avid interest in UFOs, said his friend President Richard Nixon had arranged for him to visit Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, where he viewed the remains of small alien beings under tight security. This story was confirmed by Larry Warren. who said Gleason met with him in May 1986 to hear Warren's account of a UFO experience in England [i.e. Rendlesham - EK]. During their conversation, Gleason related the Nixon aliens story and said the experience traumatized him for weeks. "You could tell he was very sincere," said Warren. "He took the whole affair very seriously and I could that he wanted to get the matter of his chest, and this was why he was telling me all this." Before his death in 1987, Gleason was asked about the incident but declined to comment, a most interesting circumstance, since it was an opportunity to refute the story if it was false. (1) 

SKIDOO was made five years prior to this alleged event and Gleason's character doesn't get to take his big LSD trip until halfway through at least, and then he mainly hallucinates twisting machine guns and overlapping bullet numbers ("I see mathematics!" he roars).

But that doesn't mean the aliens and the LSD are not connected. Why else would I have mentioned it?  Traumatizing as it must be to actually see dead aliens and learn the shocking truth about the alien reality, spectral hallucinations of Mickey Rooney dancing and waving cartoon-style sacks of spondoolicks are worse. Of course paranoia is going to result when you trip in prison, man! All one can see or do is within the confines of a cell, leading to Gleason's wondering if his daughter is his 'own' as he looks into the cracked, dirty mirror. "She's got my ears! She's got my ears!" He claps hands to his head, as if to feel the empty holes, as if wondering if she'll ever them give them back.

Hey, man, don't laugh --we've all been there. Oh wait, laughing is okay. It's a comedy.

This scene is fairly great once Gleason finds his footing, but SKIDDOO starts real rough, with an ear for comedy so leaden it's literally pain-inducing: It's a quiet night at post-modern Beverly Hills home when a remote control war erupts between Gleason's retired gangster (named, heaven's preserve us, "Tough Tony") and wife Carol Channing (wearing so much mascara her lashes stick together), meant to wow us with its 'critique' of pop culture; the fight is interrupted when Cesar Romero shows up at the dock and orders Tony to get himself arrested and hauled into jail in order to 'kiss' (kill) "Blue Chips" (Mickey Rooney), a wiseguy who's about to turn state's evidence. But he was having such a good time at home. It doesn't seem fair, but Tony is tough - so he bravely goes. Antics ensue!

If you say 'screwball' once more I'll SCREAM!

Nothing goes according to plan, of course, and rather leadenly, until Tony licks the "wrong" envelope while prison letter pen-palling. His mind opened, Tough Tony ain't so tough anymore. He gets a conscience ("Gimme a flower") and hallucinates various smoky images, most notably mob kingpin "God's" (Groucho Marx's) head on a turning screw (above).

Meanwhile Gleason's lovely daughter (Alexandra Hay) and her hippy boyfriend (John Phillip Law) head off to see "God" on His yacht. While they're gone, wife Carol brings home all their hippie friends, realizing they're living out of their VW vans, and starts washing their ratty hair in her nice modern kitchen. She's so selfless!"Let mind and body separate and remember the final reality!"

The plot after that involves the now awakened Tony's plan to bust out of jail by putting all the remaining blotter pages in a vat of mashed potatoes, thus drugging the entire prison population and creating so much confusion Gleason and his cellmates can sail past the prison walls in a balloon filled with their hopes and aspirations (after first hypnotizing the guards with an electric rainbow colored trash can dance, set to unbearably trite Nilsson music). Carol Channing turns navy admiral, the hippies turned into her galley slaves, as she pursues her daughter yachtward. When Tony fails to kiss Blue Chips, God orders her daughter's death, but by then everyone is tripping way too hard to load a gun without hallucinating smiley faces on the bullets. Channing sings the drecky/catchy theme song. What was the name of it? I had the lyre lick sheep here somewhere... whoa, leer -ick sheep... that... sounds.... right. Sounds Oww-nnnns

I can imagine how unpleasant tripping while locked in a jail cell would be, sometimes during really bad trips it could feel like that anyway, sometimes a single night could feel like 20 years in the hot box, but having to endure listening to Nilsson singing all of the closing credits in his precious little voice is surely worse than life. Tripping at the theater back in 1968 would, I imagine, have been different. Worse, I mean. No offense to Nilsson overall, but he always gave me the impression he hadn't been beaten up enough as a child.

Nilsson also plays a guard at the jail alongside Fred "Slow Burn" Clark.

Some aspects of this film are less cool than others, but one thing that is cool? Groucho Marx... on acid!

"... I was hanging around with friends from the Hog Farm, who were extras in the movie. Skidoo was pro-acid propaganda thinly disguised as a comedy adventure ... One of the characters in Skidoo was a Mafia chieftain named God. Screenwriter Bill Cannon had suggested Groucho Marx for the part ... [Groucho] was concerned about the script of Skidoo because it pretty much advocated LSD which he had never tried, but he was curious. Moreover, he felt a certain responsibility to his young audience not to steer them wrong, so could I possibly get him some pure stuff and would I care to accompany him on a trip. I did not play hard to get. We arranged to ingest those little white tablets one afternoon at the home of an actress in Beverly Hills ...

... Groucho was holding on to his cigar for a long time, but he never smoked it, he only sniffed it occasionally. 'Everybody has their own Laurel and Hardy,' he mused. 'A miniature Laurel and Hardy, one on each shoulder. Your little Oliver Hardy bawls you out - he says, 'Well this is a fine mess you've gotten us into.' And your little Stan Laurel gets all weepy - 'Oh, Ollie. I couldn't help it. I'm sorry, I did the best I could ...'

... Later, when Groucho started chuckling to himself, I hesitated to interrupt his reverie, but I had to ask, 'What struck you funny?' 'I was thinking about this movie, Skidoo,' he said. 'I mean some of it is just plain ridiculous. This kid puts his stationery, which is soaked in LSD, into the water supply of the prison, and suddenly everybody gets completely reformed. There's a prisoner who says, 'Oh, gosh, now I don't have to be a rapist anymore!' ... But I'm getting a big kick out of playing somebody named God like a dirty old man. You wanna know why ... it's because - do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?'

... He recalled Otto Preminger telling him about his own response to taking LSD and then he mimicked Preminger's accent: "I saw tings, bot I did not zee myself.' Groucho was looking in a mirror on the dining room wall, and he said, 'Well, I can see myself but I still don't understand what the hell I'm doing here." A week later, Groucho told me that the Hog Farm had turned him on with marijuana on the set of Skidoo. When Skidoo was released, Tim Leary saw it, and he cheerfully admitted, 'I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He's much hipper than me ...' Posted by Kliph Nesteroff - Classic Television Showbiz 

Gut Gott! If I didn't know from cinema history that Preminger did acid I never would have believed it because SKIDOO is mighty square. The harder it tries not to be square the squarer it is, like quicksand. I've never taken LSD on a film set (that I know of, man) but one thing I do know: psychedelics can make things seem a lot funnier at the time than they 'really' are.... know what I mean? Need I say more? Terry Southern might have saved it. He almost saved Candy. Lord, could you imagine how much worse it would have been with a Nilsson score?

For awhile, a long long time, SKIDOO was totally MIA. It was much better that way. The thought of Groucho playing God seemed so appetizing--Groucho being such an acidhead-friendly icon to begin with (watch any of the Marx's first five films after tripping at a Dead show and see what I mean)--we longed to see this film for decades. How deserved was its rarity! It was hard to see for our protection.

Still, Pandora's Box and all. We couldn't believe it could be as half as bad as those who had seen it claimed.

Right there you have an inkling: what looks good on paper....

HEAD (above), which came out the same year - gets it all right where SKIDOO gets it all wrong

But I also know this from way, way too much personal experience: after awhile even the awesome visuals and life lessons of LSD can get redundant, like being thrown up against the same aquarium window time and time again, able to see paradise but cut off from it. It's like being on a Disney ride that can neither be slowed nor speeded up, nor exited, on endless repeat. The paranoia gradually lessens as you get the hang of not fighting it, but the surrealism ends too soon and the paradise-- where you long to stay-- is just something you pass by on the ride. And the ride doesn't stop. And you can't get off til it does. You end up forced to confront the fact that all was revealed to you years ago, the first time you ever tripped. You were given homework by gods and spirit animals. You were told how to make use of those revelations granted. But all you did was trip more, until the spirit animals didn't even bother to show.  Coming down off of the acid that showed you what to do once you were no longer on it and so going back onto it to try and remember, becomes the whole show, an endless loop of diminishing returns, gradually giving way to alcoholism and idiocy.

Now the list of things you must do to be free from ego's headlock has doubled and that goal is so far away it's no brighter than the candle at the far end of the room, dancing like a cigarette tip in the hand of the night.

And this all happens over the course of four hours. Endlessly.

Like so many comedies of the era, SKIDOO is packed with old timers from the 30s-40s looking for a few days work, a cameo saying whatever, and they mirror in their own confusion that of an audience far too easily amused and passive due to their own smuggled-into-the-theater chemical stash. In Hollywood, I guess, if word gets out you're making a big-budget youth market boondoggle your set fills to overflowing with weird old character actors looking for a walk-on and free craft services. A chance to connect with the younger generation could mean supporting spots and star turns and god knows what for years to come. Just look at all the old fogey greats racing around the AIP beach party movies: Boris Karloff, Don Rickles, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre--that's just off the top of my head. None of those cats made it to SKIDOO, but there is Slim ""Major Kong" Pickens as a radio operator, George Raft as a sea captain, Peter Lawford as a senator, Frank Gorshin as a hipster capo in on the Rooney job...

Surprisingly, Frank Gorshin looks the worst. Prison disagrees with him. BUT!!! between him, Cesar "the Joker" Romero (as Tough Tony's godfather) and Burgess "Penguin" Meredith (as the warden) there are no less than three villains from the Batman TV show in here (Preminger himself being 'Mr. Freeze' makes a fourth, albeit behind the camera)! Would there was a Newmar! Would there was a willowy Julie Newmar indeed. Ah well, it's nice to see John Phillips Law (DIABOLIK! Pygar!) as the beautiful white hippy version of Sidney Poitier in GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, i.e. tall, and engaged to Alexandra Hay--she who us born to knock your socks off in a mod miniskirt, and bound to unnerve her father whomever she marries. Proving this is all just a very expensive major studio version of an AIP beach movie, Frankie Avalon even plays Romero's playboy son. He's the reminder that 'youth' can still be square, the last gasp reminder of pre-hippie cool. Hippies is stolen your girls, Frankie! Frankie you're old!

It's worth noting how genuinely revolutionary, relative to today's inclement times, it is that Groucho Marx and Otto Preminger did LSD as preparation for making the movie. The former, as we've learned, did it expressly so he could be sure he wasn't leading the kids down a wrong path, as the movie was considered an advocation of LSD use (which may have something to do with its being so hard to see until lately); Preminger took it because he was originally scheduled to direct an anti-LSD movie and decided contempt prior to investigation was wrong! That a 78 year-old man like Groucho and a 63 year-old man like Otto would decide to take LSD before either advocating or condemning it marks how superior they are to the 'just say no' fearmongers of today (and the 80s). Has lack of investigation prior to demonization ever stopped out current flock of old white mwen from their displays of 'think of the children!" hysteria? Some relatives of people I know even prefer to die of malnutrition rather than smoke weed-- even if told by their doctors it will help relieve post-chemo nausea.

As Preminger might say, People.... zey used to be so awesome.

One of SKID's biggest promoters is Christian Divine, who lays out some backstory:

Based on a more satirical, whimsical script by rebel scribe Doran William Cannon (Brewster McCloud; Hex), Skidoo was to be Preminger's first real comedy since 1954's The Moon Is Blue, which caused a scandal by using the verboten word, "virgin" and led to the destruction of the prohibitive Production Code. Preminger invited controversy all through his career, often battling the forces of political censorship to tackle now issues in his films. Par for the course, he had originally planned to direct John Hersey's LSD cautionary novel, Too Far To Walk, but after meeting with counter-culture impressario Tom Law -- whose brother John Phillip Law had appeared in Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1966) -- the director had a change of heart. Tom Law explained, "When I met Otto, he told me he was making an anti-LSD film. I asked him why and tried to explain he wasn't being truthful to the subject, that I knew many people who had positive experiences and he was contributing to stereotypes. He listened and agreed. He was cool."

Although Bill Cannon had been brought in to adapt Too Far To Walk, Preminger impulsively decided to buy his sample script Skidoo. Francis Ford Coppola urged the wary Cannon to sell his screenplay, advising him that this would be a perfect entry into Hollywood. He sold it for 75,000 dollars and Otto Preminger immersed himself in the world of the hippies with a paisley vengeance. As a genuinely progressive soul, he hung out with Tom and John Phillip Law, who owned the legendary 60s rock mansion, The Castle, high in the Hollywood Hills. Bob Dylan composed on a typewriter while Nico lounged and Harrison Ford did carpentry. (Christian Divine, Six Degrees of Skidoo )

I'm very happy this film has a champion in Christian Divine. I don't think SKIDOO's anywhere near as engaging as HEAD, YELLOW SUBMARINE and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, but it holds its own against the similar bloated spectacles cranked out by the fading old Hollywood studio system as they vainly to meet the youth of the 60s halfway. It at least dares to imagine a bright, truly deranged future for all concerned, outside the limitations of cultural difference like the differences between inside jail and out, crime and the law, straight and zonked or alien and human. While AIP movies like THE TRIP had to show Peter Fonda's head crack open in the final freeze frame and run disclaimers to appease nervous producers, SKIDOO sets sail with God on a candy-colored sailboat. Suck as it may, it keeps its tab on its tongue, and stays pro-LSD down to its prison-striped socks.

---

1. Mars, Jim - Alien Agenda, p. 122 (Harper, NY, 1997)

Fourteen or Fight! WILD IN THE STREETS (1968) or "The Day it all Happened, Baby."

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 (1968) to prove it. This is the film that made good on the ever-looming urban myth about the evil hippie plan to spike the water supply with LSD, that foresaw the lowering of the voting age (the age to vote didn't get lowered to 18 until 1971), and threatened to 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 the only-then semi-old 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 x Martin Sheen).

Max is handsome and charismatic; he can even get away with having a weird pony tail - he's that hot. Richard Pryor plays his drummer; Kevin Coughlin is his 14 year-old queer (!) super genius accountant and guitar player; Diane Varsi is his ex-child star / acid casualty senator. Shelly Winters brays to the rafters and his glomming mom and her schtick has not aged well (until she gets subjected to 'LSD therapy' and decides, "I'm sure my son has a very good reason for paralyzing the country" - she really nails the vibe; her eyes glow in awe over a flower) Songs include "Shape of Things to Come" (a real-life hit), "We're the 52%" and "Fourteen or Fight!" which encourages youth to go on a rampage if the voting age isn't lowered to 14. Eventually, after a few more rungs in between, it is. As soon as that happens, naturally, Frost is elected prez, baby and the organized jihad against the older generation begins in earnest. But his days are numbered: age stops for no Pan.

What's interesting is that this film came out a year before Woodstock and Altamont, but these events are already prefigured in "the biggest block party in history" that narrator Paul Frees calls Frost's Sunset Strip demonstration. Frees' narration also mentions 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 it not had a late-inning title change (to CULT OF THE DAMNED) to capitalize on the Manson murders, or if it had a real hook like this whole voting age business.

But hey, baby, 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, even pipe-smoking voice, especially on college 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, Vietnam, and sexual taboos raged and America seemed ready to rip its face off.  If they wanted, these bands could start a real revolution with their long hair and their rock music.

I wasn't thee, of course, but anyone can feel the change and nervousness just by watching GIMME SHELTER. The scene were Melvin Belli acting as the Stones' lawyer, meets with assorted SF city planners to coordinate the Altamon Speedway free concert. There's a sense the city needs to accommodate the crowds the Stones will bring and not the other way around. You can feel the unease as the old powers bow to the whims of the young. And then later in the film, 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 without any big crowd scenes, really via nothing more than tinted stock footage of the nightly crowds on the Sunset Strip, overlapping with a parking lot bonfire, parked motorcycles, stalled traffic, random shots of crowds dancing, tinted windows, blinking signs, audience shots from earlier rock concert films and earlier love-ins, skylines, and the Capital Building -all whirled together in a color-styled Eisensteinian overlapping montage set to the bands' music and cheering and sirens. In other words, nary a farthing spent on crowd scenes (PS 1/19 - the version recently shown on TCM didn't have this footage. Could it have been added later to pad for TV running times, like AIP often did before selling packages to TV?). Genius! To give the film that you-are-there youth clout, there are walk-on cameos from youth idols like Bobby Sherman, Peter Tork, and 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 film ever made; in the style Corman brought to AIP (and later took with him) a bigger canvas is suggested by drawing on parallel drive-in experiences (i.e. we don't need 'new' crowd shots, we've seen plenty already).

Writer Robert Thom wrote the script, 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 that ANGEL ANGEL AKA CULT OF THE DAMNED (the fat girl's rich bitch mom Jennifer Jones sleeps with her daughter's rock-star boyfriend); BLOODY MAMA (Mama--Winters again--sleeps with her son's gay lover); DEATHRACE 2000 (son runs over old lady); LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE (snide old lady gossip columnist hounds Byronic filmmaker and his lesbian assistant) etc. It doesn't take much psycho-analytic deconstruction to glean Thom's whole bag, making him the link between the AIP drive-in and Tennessee Williams. Sebastian Venable's fingerprints are all over Thom's 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 seduction but never love; 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 drawls, with a loving, languid smile, "I think... you boys... are fags."

Again, it may seem 'strange' but hey, for a commercial film from 1968 meant for mass drive-in appeal, that kind of risk-taking is awesome. Buried under the main text, and enough psychedelic light show madness and teeny bopper blonde hair to keep the older generation confused, it can fly right by if you ain't lookin'.  For all that great covert stride-taking, however, 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, like the horn section is sneering as their talents are wasted on 1-4-5 rock tripe. But they shall play it or go to the camps! Even Shelly Winters eventually has to bow and gurgle to please them, and methinks we're meant to feel bad for her, for--in her bloated, indiscriminate devouring--does she not represent America itself? 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: '69 - The Sexual Revolution' and Hugh Hefner talking about how he and Shel Silverstein appreciated the free love movement more than the youth around them 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 sexual liberation as a kid in the 1970s that I've come to feel I'll never--no matter how debauched I become--ever live up to that level of freedom, and the younger kids are threatened, not by my moral rigidity, but my lack thereof. I preach, not of decency, but of the glory of a vanished age, a time before safety, health, environmentalism, and antidepressants (which are a lot like the daily LSD supplements in the re-grooving camps), a time when sex didn't need apologies and guilt trailing after it, repression and fear blocking its path. WILD IN THE STREETS reflects the other 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 racist, sexist, homophobic Anita Bryants, or at least reduced them to powerless Shelly Winters caricatures, the type of whose raving actually made the average Americans more tolerant (Anita Bryant's rabid hate-mongering actually turned a lot of Middle-America around on the issue --i.e. it's this bitch that is evil, not them). But our nation is nothing if not bi-polar, half terrified family man, half crazed druggie biker.

That's the secret of America: when you're always fighting yourself, you can't lose.

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

Can I please have a doll now? BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS

Like a pendulum rocking between extremes of repressive conservative 'decency' and louche Dionysian abandon, America swings, baby, from the repressive 1950s and swinger 1970s, then back into the slasher repression of AIDS 80s. Knowing this, one should always be aware of what academic social studies classes don't want you to know: mass social change isn't brought about by education and activism but by drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll. You want to see how deep the wormhole goes? Take this pill, man. Five dollars.

LSD changed the face of the world, or at least left it looking melted in the mirror through dilating pupils. Back in 1986, I had to look very hard before I could get my hands on 'doses' -at least outside of a Dead show. It was a dangerous mission and my freshmen coterie were scared to death of me once I'd 'broken through.' But back in 1967 (I hear) you could get dosed just by accepting a handful of free samples from Owsley's bucket brigade at the entrance of the latest love-in. It's so typically human--American even--that what is casual, cool and even sanctioned by the middle class one year is considered a monstrous crime the next, and the masses are way too hypnotized to think twice about it. Before it was cool, now it's evil, end of discussion. And soon even the kids you thought were cool might run when the ultimate tab flips their way.  (1)

Sex and music are well chronicled in our cultural history, but drugs, too often, become demonized rather than eulogized and enshrined as they're expanded and replaced in an ever tightening gyre of vertical integration. Thus the hangover-comedown of LSD (60s) begets Valium (70s), and then cocaine (80s) because you're sluggish from the Valium, and then coke makes you depressed the next day, so you need to cheer up --it's the 90s (ecstasy). And then, in the 00s, you sober up and get high on God and fellowship via AA because none of that other shit works anymore. And then! In the 10's, because God thinks you're ready: Salvia Divinorum.

Harsh green reptilian gatekeepers debating whether to eat you alive or admit you to their tender garden, Salvia's gatekeepers wont keep the gate unlocked for long; even now attention-seeking senators who know nothing whatsoever about the plant are striving to make it illegal, solely based on a video with Miley Cyrus.

But, let's backtrack and add the music to the equation: Jimi Hendrix defined the 60s.. and acid, we've covered that already, man. But in the 1970s, was there 'Valium music' the way there was acid rock?

Yes, it was called the Carpenters. In the 1970s, Valium music could be found on something called 'variety shows' - day-glo family-friendly mixtures of corny old Vaudeville jokes and the old soft shoe, powder-blue leisure suits and bland musical numbers done in crazy feathered costumes. The stars/hosts were generally a boy and a girl together, sometimes married (Shields and Yarnell, The Captain and Tenille; Sonny and Cher; Tony Orlando and Dawn) sometimes siblings (Donnie and Marie Osmond), sometimes Pink Lady and Jeff. If these options were all too extreme, there was Lawrence Welk. It was a time when kids shows were druggy and drug shows kiddy. Thanks to Rosie Greer and Marlo Thomas in a little thing called Free to Be You and Me, it was all right to cry, and even boys could have dolls. I'd love a doll right now, in fact.

In case you think it's just a name for actual dolls like Raggedy Ann, or babes in mini-skirts, let me hep you that a doll is whatever benzo/diazapam derivations--roofies, downers, yellowjackets, blues, Xanax---you happen to have in your purse, and may I have one? Free to be's William ain't the only bitch wants a doll. The other half of the entendre is that these are babes we're talking about and, like all good things, they come in packs of three (See also: Charlie's Angels and Three on a Match). In all three definitions--women, pills, children's toys--dolls calm us down, the way the presence of our giant mom calmed us down the morning after the terrifying gulf of her nightly absence.

An unofficial 'sequel' to THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (left), the adaptation of Jacqueline Suzanne's inexplicably popular junk novel, BEYOND is redeemed by three things - 1) the naive squarete' of the two guys behind the script (Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer) who clearly have no inkling of the life they're depicting; 2) the absolute gonzo coolness of the actors, particularly Z-Man (John Lazar) and Lance Rock (the late, great Michael Blodgett), and 3) the hotness and deadpan comic delivery of the girls, both in the band and without--especially Cynthia Meyers, Dolly Read, and--most importantly--Edy Williams as Ashley St. Ives. There's also a triangle with black band member Marcia McBroom (always present, but segregated, partner-wise), and a romance with Charles "That's Jim Pembrey, Goddamnit" Napier as one of the 'good ones.' There's budding lesbian outing, drag kings, and a Nazi butler/bartender ("We could have used you at the Russian Front!" he exclaims after Blodgett punches out snotty punter Harris). Put it all together and you have something bound to offend everyone, sooner or later, even strung-out critics like myself. It's like one of those "Funny or Die" videos where the rantings of a drunk child are lip-synced and acted out by an all-star adult cast. In this case it's cool, hip beautiful young actors mouthing dialogue written by naive lecherous squares.

All that's missing is any sense of restraint or human decency. Indeed there's a lot I don't like about this film, such as the boilerplate homophobe misogyny of the finale, wherein the lesbians are slaughtered without a shred of concern for justice - "Theirs wasn't an evil love, but evil did come from it" - What the fuck is that about, Roger? How did evil come from being gay? One 'hopes' that Ebert is making fun of misogyny and homophobia, but it's still a little too much to have the lesbian get a gun shoved in her mouth and to suggest it's somehow brought upon her for daring to deign the cock. Considering how judgmental and alarmed Meyer got about I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (see my Ebert-GRAVE piece here), it's odd that Ebert should have written such a strangely misogynist and sexophobic film (DOLLS is far more misogynist than SPIT in my opinion). Yet there are redemptive moments: Lance Rock, pausing in his thrashing of dopey Harris (David Gurian) to greet a cool black athlete named Randy (James Iglhart). They're the only two cool, real people in the room, and though they're both encroaching on the girls of the 'sweet, sensitive guys' like Emerson (Harrison Page) and Harris, it's okay, buxom beauties best be served by real men, not wusses. You heard me! G'head on Rock 'n Randy.

Let's just time Lancelot as he comes charging to the rescue!

The original VALLEY's highlight was Patty Duke screaming for "dolls" in a back alley as the camera panned slowly up and away on an elaborate crane shot, like her guardian angel had finally had enough of her whining and was heading home right as she was finally realizing God was there the whole time. Some bitchy drag queens may think that's hilarious (which is fine) but drug-addled divas on their way down are awfully easy targets for lampooning. Even with overacting and tone-deaf emotional registration you feel bad about sneering at the original VALLEY... the eerie echoes of meta self-reflexiveness are all over the film: gorgeous Sharon Tate killing herself to escape her controlling, greedy stage mom and then dying in real-time at the hands of the Mansons shortly after; drug-addicted former child actor Patty Duke playing a drug-addicted adult actor too fucked up to even play herself in a Broadway show; the sad Andre and Dory Previn theme song, which was supposed to have been sung by poor Judy Garland but--for reasons likely mirrored in Duke's doll-loving arc--wasn't. Dionne Warwick took over and does a fine job, but she can't capture the rainbow at-the-end-of-the-Kansas crucifixion cruise like Judy, and the result is like being at your wit's end and visiting a new psychiatrist who smiles but has no insight into your woes and makes you feel even more lonely than if you were just plain alone, and what's worse, refuses to refill your prescription, which was the only reason you went in to see her in the first place! She's worried you're becoming addicted. Hah! "Becoming"...that's a laugh.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS comes in after all this meta-horror and plays up the intentional comedy underlying the venomous 'reality' of Hollywood in the swinging sixties much more than the original ever dared, so overly concerned was it with soapy gloss, its men all perfect specimens of the sort that look flawless in the showroom and then fall apart and dissolve your bank accounts within a few years or months of marriage and/or abortions. That's all gone with BEYOND: Aside from taking place in 'the Valley' where Valley-yum runs wild and free, and the overall 'three professional girls living together and being romanced up the ladder' structure, there's not a whit to compare them. But what BEYOND has that leaves Robson's film in the dust, is Russ Meyer's short attention span direction and the dancers who trade Wildean quips as they frug (the kind of thing that was all the rage at the time because of LAUGH-IN, seen also in THE STUD, etc), and the countless situations where the degenerates prove to have more integrity than their square suit-tie job equivalents, but just barely.

Yet even as far as cult items go, DOLLS is an 'outside, looking in' film, showing the relative lack of LA decadence-experience for screenwriters Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert. Meyer was a desert rat: much better at salt flat timing trials, rural gas station squares, and horny super-vixens who drive up wanting more than their tank filled. And Meyer was a Chicago movie critics. The groovy craziness of the LA elite is way beyond their ken. It's clear that neither ever did any drugs nor got invited to Cyro's, or wherever the jet-set and young trippers danced and screwed. Without the amazingness of Z-man and Lance--two fine study actors who breathe the rarefied air of the genuinely cool--the film would be adrift in Greg Brady's attic bedroom hippie love den denial. Blodgett and Lazar do such a fine job--even when forced to manically utter whole pages of nonsensical madness, written with no attention for how people really speak--they bring it through the veil into 'high' art.

But the 1970s wasn't just about acid, coke, downers and free love and cool guys with happenings that freaked them out. It was about innocence living comfortably next to decadence via pop culture and a unified love field that included sex but then flooded past its tawdry borders so that genuine brotherly cross-generational non-sex love proffered too, right there in the popular culture. We in Middle America may not have known, or wanted to know that the Village People were gay or that disco was synonymous with cocaine, or what was making Karen Carpenter so skinny. But we could love them for what we saw and heard. We were clueless but free, ignorant in our bliss, bonded by the lack of options on aerial-antennae television.

In the theaters, R-rated movies meant serious business, and the no-kids-admitted-without-parent thing was strictly enforced the way cigarette age restrictions are now. So they kept adult things from us more easily. The R-rated films of the 1970s were about tawdry NYC nightlife or Italian (or Italian-American) slashers -- or--more usually-- both. NYC in the 1970s was a cesspool with an oasis of Broadway shows surrounded by grimy XXX-rated deathtraps. But on TV, the innocent variety show ruled by default - appealing to no demographic in particular and therefore suitable for all. TV shows had a Zen quality wherein old timers from 30s B-movies could find a whole second life as sitcom neighbors or Hollywood Square swingers, while teen idols re-enacted 50s teen delinquent plot lines in hip hugger flares and wild afros. It didn't matter the shit was corny- no one was paying attention anyway --we were talking and eating popcorn and bouncing off the walls. It was grand.

In other words, it was a time before niche demarcations. The stoner had to lie down with the clueless duffer; you could be weird but you couldn't curse. So you had Greg Brady (left) donning a fringe vest and getting a lava lamp, only to learn such things didn't make him cool; and you had ultra-square film nerd Roger Ebert writing faux hipster LA dialogue for a bunch of actual L.A. hipsters because he once wrote nice things about a war correspondent-cum-softcore brüstemann. Nothing made sense. The result--which kicked Russ Meyer back to the minors--was rated-X at the time but seems almost suitable for children today, it's a stoner film for your grandparents, a misogynist homophobic countercultural f-you to the man and to the hep cat. Like those variety shows gone very wrong, BEYOND has the frilly glitz but then deep trouble right below, it offends everybody, sooner or later, but not enough to make it not a classic of its sort.

While today, our copious late night cable channels demonstrate how painful it is watching normal people try to be weird. BEYOND THE VALLEY gives you weird people trying to measure up to a square's idea of weird --and you can feel the deranged energy spilling forth from their gonzo refractions. Whether in the first or thousandth viewing, you're bound to find new reasons to both love and hate it. Maybe that's because BEYOND never had a time of its own so it's never grown dated. It was too square for late 60s but too wild for the early 70s. It was too violent for the free-love crowd and too free-love for the violent crowd. It's too high for low art and too low for an art high. In short, it's cult. I may not know what cult actually means, but I know what I love, and I know what I hate, and in BEYOND everything I love and hate is rolled into one dark, twisted snapshot of the whole goddamned whizzbang red white and blue hooplah that is a Chicago film nerd's idea of Tinseltown.  BANG! BANG! What is that sound I hear? Father dear father, come home with me now, and bring either this, or CANDY (1968) or MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1971) to your next gay or straight movie night, and never be invited again.

1. other evidences of drug hysteria having no correlation whatever to actual danger: At the turn of the century cocaine was in Coca-Cola, heroin was OTC, but aspirin was prescription only, and planes had smoking sections.What was all-pervasive and legal yesterday can become demonized as hell tomorrow, and no one thinks twice about it! Soylent Green is people! And YOU'RE NEXT!

The Hatched Man: A SOFT SEL-PORTRAIT OF SALVADOR DALI

A timeless made-for-70s TV classic of countercultural madness - this narrated soft shoe scheduled to run in an hour time slot and captures a crazy "happening" of Dali's, which Orson Welles narrates with bemused awe. Old Dali is kind of what Welles would like to be, a complete nut, but Welles always carried the burden of being a gluttonous hedonist and--despite being a madly egotistical wunderkind--harrowingly sane. Still he makes it seem like Dali just snaps his fingers and a huge crowd of attractive, barely dressed local hippie children come a runnin' to sing and dance and parade around, their icon the straight-faced Dali leading the way, holding a giant papier mache rhino head and completely lovingly deadpan serious! If Dali were to laugh or act foolish he'd ruin the effect, but since he carries his egotistic self-importance to such lengths he shows an acute aware of comedic timing and genius rivaling perhaps only Jack Benny's.

Other highlights include his sculpting a face mask out of a sheet of tin foil right in front of the camera, a moment of true rare alchemy--seeing a master at work--(as in his amazingly small, detailed paintings we see he has the hands of a watchmaker or surgeon while carrying the brain of a lunatic--a devastating combination. He also hatches out of a giant egg on the shore and takes us on a boat tour through the trippy rock formations around his shorefront home in Portiligat Spain.

Meant as a one-hour special for network TV and done in the heady early 70s style of shows like the Leonard Nimoy-narrated IN SEARCH OF... the show's bombastic library music cues and Dali's endless monologue of broken twisted meta-language--which takes him a long time to say hardly anything--gets on the nerves after awhile, no matter what your substance. It takes the old duffer about five minutes to say: "The only crazy thing about Dali is that he is... not crazy... at all!" But as far as acid culture goes, this man set the bar high and early. Even in 2009, hippies would probably flock from all over the world at a snap of his fingers... even if they were skeleton zombie fingers due to Dali's TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD style resurrection, and that's probably not far off... if you know what I mean. (find it here)

"Zabriskie Point is Anywhere"

This month saw the DVD debut of Zabriskie Point (1970), which is a major event for Antonioni fans and lovers of the Woodstock fall-out cinematic era, i.e. anyone who ever stuck up for Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny. But that's not me. I'm a big fan of the pristine, shimmering Criterion DVDs of Antonioni's L'Aventura and L'Eclisse but can imagine hating them just as much if not for drugs and Godard to prep me on their weird iconographical dysmorphia, and they weren't so beautifully restored-- anamorphic, shimmering like mirages. If they were on crappy "Genius Entertainment" like La Notte (pixelated picture with burned in subtitles!) or didn't have Monica Vitti, I'd not care for them. In other words, if they were Zabriskie Point. Luckily, that as Floyd. 

In its continental plate mashing contrast between meditative isolation and crowded canvas capitalist (and/or socialist) sound and fury, Point is practically a gender-reversed L'Eclisse - with Los Angeles instead of Rome and the emptiness of Death Valley instead of a corner near a rain barrel. The motif of Monica Vitti taking a moment to vibe on the wind rattling the flagpoles outside her friend's apartment complex in L'Eclisse finds Point parallel with the sullen kid playing the ruined piano strings at the desert commune; the stockmarket hullabaloo is replaced by Rod Taylor's pervy real estate dealings; explosions occur instead of eclipses; optimistic California hippies replace the 'too smart to be vapid like everyone else, but trying to fake it for lack of a better option' Rome jet setters.

But the center cannot hold. Without ennui and old European architecture to ground him, Antonioni just .... floats... away. The youth of America in 1969 are not the same youth as the ones in London 1966. Not even close.

There is some architecture, of course, and more to come, designed by Rod "Time Machine" Taylor, who presumes he's here in Antonioni's America to work, and so he does, in a very modernist office, and to roll in the hay with his cute hippie temp, played by cute but blank Daria Halperin. Soon she's driving off into the desert, to the middle of nowhere, there for notation and tryst. Rod's already out there, eyeing empty desert space for a real estate development deal. Meanwhile the young radical of her dreams is maybe killing a cop and stealing a pink plane.

If he can fly a plane, you'd think he could get a real job.

In an unusual touch, all the rock acts who contributed songs get star billing early in the credits, which roll over multiracial revolutionary arguments at the UCLA student union in a semi-documentary commune style reminiscent of Billy Jack but with a Godardian edge of disbelieving cynicism. The bands are all good: Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia, Roscoe Holcomb singing "I wish I was a single girl again." I had this LP decades before seeing the film and the film doesn't do the album justice. Then again there is no justice in an Antonioni film, just us... and just...ice.

Before meeting up with our young cop killer hero, Daria pulls over at an obscure town to locate hippie guru James Patterson (!), who has been turning a peaceable desert scrub wasteland into a David Koresh-meets-Hills Have Eyes playground of burnt out cars and unruly children. "He's gonna ruin a piece of American history," warns the grizzled cafe-owner. Kids throw rocks through the cafe windows, echoing our hero's own rock tossing and hinting Antonioni is more than a little worried his the free love generation his Blow-up helped define is just a pig's head on a stick away from Fliestown.

But that's just one sticky stop on the road out into the Southwestern US wasteland, and gradually all the harshness and industrial "Red Desert"-style offenses to the utopian ideal-- red cans, black trailers, malevolently inexpressive hick faces-- lead to her cop-killing new lover, and epiphany, freedom and "nothing's terrible anymore" ("far out") revelations which are then dissolved in the simple grace of a beautiful Jerry Garcia guitar solo and the sex/orgy scene to end all primordial desert sex/orgy scenes (they wish- there was a better one in the same year's Dunwich Horror), an ecstatic release after all that nerve-wracking industrial clatter. Daria's dress and costume changes in a quick montage and she ends up looking like the ghost of an old settler; the interchange of actors hips us to the mythic ego dissolve of groovy love. They are no longer merely themselves, but Man and Woman in the primal timeless sea of masks and derivations. A long shot of the orgy goes for mid-Elysian Bosch painting or what the final scene in the Beyond would look like if Fulci had the same budget, but it's very under-baked. It's Antonioni trying to be open-hearted even as he recognizes this new paradise is just the old inferno with a forced California smile masking a sense of weariness (the lovers all spread out on a skin-colored hill are barely visible, and probably sick to death from dehydration from the all-day shoot).

One thing that I'm reasonably sure is intentional on Antonioni's part is the hypocrisy at the core of Daria's "nothing's terrible" mantra. It's no sooner spoken than superseded by an elitist youthful cliquey vanity as she wrinkles her nose at some ugly tourists (we see their unconscious consumerist sense of entitlement). She also fails to show love to a cop who pulls up near her as she wanders alone in the desert, probably just to see if she's all right. She looks like she's been wandering for days and maybe he just wanted to offer her some water. The desert dehydrates you faster than you can imagine. She treats him like he's got the plague.

Nothing's terrible anymore... indeed. It's pretty clear there's at least one thing... 



For Antonioni then, it's really a matter of (r)evolution rather than the acceptance Daria preaches (but doesn't practice --in true poor little rich girl fashion); even the revolutionaries seem stuck on the hateful caterpillar trip. The butterflies awaken and are usually shot down by the sheriff within a few reels (this time one gets to literally soar in a stolen plane, painted in paisleys to drive the metaphor home) during which they may or may not love a lifetime's worth (how can they possibly know?).

Drugs too get a strange lens from Antonioni - though supposedly part of the emerging scene, the boy (Frechette) doesn't turn on, doesn't trip or smoke weed or nothing. In this and other things he begins to resemble a genuinely creepy antihero rather than just a charismatic outlaw. Just like his alter-ego Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, we're never sure which of any of his exploits are real or vividly imagined. Just as we can't know if his reticence to try psychedelic drugs is a result of fear (he's never tried), anger (he's never been offered), or experience (he had a bad trip once - and is now a pussy).


Sandwiched gloomily between the Woodstock idealism and the casual Romeo-Juliet murder sprees of the early 1970's, Zabriskie Point winds up with no other way to get attention than to blow up a bunch of books, filmed at a zillion different angles and speeds for the notorious climax. While crazy Pink Floyd music builds to a thunderous scream we see books, tons of them, blowing up like beautiful sea anemones and octopi and fireworks all made of pages of print.

It's an apocalyptic rejection of language, maybe, but Daria Halperin is just not in the same league as Monica Vitti and when she stares emptily off at this real or imagined spectacle we're not transfixed by her transfixion. The dew is off the lily. It's only later, with Sissy Spacek's glowing golden wheat field hair in Badlands (1973), that the transfixing spell of "hellion next door" beauty is restored and the modern artist as outlaw role play can sally forth. Malick knows better than to hold back tastefully on color saturation during a once-in-a-lifetime natural setting sunlight-halo / red hair combination. Halperin's hair isn't even considered as a means of reflection and natural beauty. She's almost more like Jeanne Moreau in La Notte, just a tan little brunette goblin loose in the world, judging everything she sees like she's all that.

If we too feel a little excluded from what little of there is of a party in Zabriskie Point its perhaps because Antonioni seems to be coming to terms with the realization he'll always be so excluded from this scene, always an exile, too old to fit in, yet too anarchic for his same-age peers. Stranded outside every cause, cursed, like Godard, to be too smart to succumb to a hoped-for idealism. Even as the guest of honor at the wake for the post-post-modernist cultural landscape he's helped destroy, Antonioni doesn't know what to say as far as small talk or adult conversation, only how to look at the items on the young people's book shelves, the unexploded titles, like an older guy apartment party wallflower. This new world is for the young and tripped-out and he has no clue how to sit around in paradise pretending he's having fun playing the same old games he's long ago mastered; all he can do is blow up the old world, then just keep the camera rolling on the embers while he whispers like a proud parent to the corpse by his side: "That's a-my daughter up there!" But still, he's not proud. He wishes he could prouder.

Nothing's terrible anymore.

But doesn't that mean, too, that everything is?

Great Dads of the 1970s #1: Jon Voight as Luke in COMING HOME

"Ah, the smugness, I can't stand it." -Jane

"I dont belive it will change, but you're beautiful when you're excited." - Jon

I was just a kid when COMING HOME came out but I remember its impact. Along with THE DEER HUNTER, released the same year, there was a whirlwind of controversy and outpourings of support, anger and raw feeling over a war that hadn't been over more than a few years. The media was aflame and Oscars fell like rain and now, thirty years later all we have left are the DVDs, while another war rages and the best we can get are polemics like LIONS FOR LAMBS. But what of 1978? In hindsight, The DEER HUNTER seems to have almost nothing to do with Vietnam, being instead an American Reifenstahl Alpenfilme, but it's still good and gets repackaged and made glossy and classic, but why not COMING HOME?

The red state stigmatization of Fonda and her strong character may have something to do with HOME's lack of corporate support as far as DVD re-marketing, but I would guess the answer really lies in the fact that its genuinely subversive, in a positive almost painfully human way. Leonard Maltin's guide gives it a mere three and a half stars to the DEER's four, citing the film's "lapses into melodrama" as the reason. Of course THE DEER HUNTER (like APOCALYPSE NOW which came out the following year) is really a "guy" movie. (Maltin says it "packs an emotional wallop"), COMING HOME is neither a man's nor a woman's picture. If I wasn't all obsessive and insane at the moment I would probably never use these sorts of words, but: it's a human picture. It's a picture for the non gender-specific lover archetype which we embody only when we are at our best. A lot of us can't stomach that sort of intimacy for long; we'd rather reach for the easy comfort of our threadbare genre straitjackets. I'm as guilty of that as anyone. I can barely watch COMING HOME even now. I'm watching the DVD as I write this and I have to pause every few minutes, for breaks that stretch into hours. I have to write like mad to deal with the pain.

And no, Voight's character, Luke, is not an actual parent--nor shall he ever be one, apparently, thanks to his waist-down paralysis--so his being considered a 1970's dad might seem a bit odd. But hey, man, there are people all over the world needing parenting, not the bossy, browbeating kind but the unconditional nurturing and sense of strong support kind. One need only grace, gravitas and guts, genuine non-gender specific love, and maybe a mustache and fine foxy beard to be the best of 70s dads; kids will come from all over, from all ages and groups.

Luke has those things and as he goes from soul-ruptured angry young paraplegic to nurturing activist/lover, you get to see deep into his wide-open soul--both the actor and his character--and his innate majesty shines out at you; he's the wounded fisher king accepting the fact no Parsifal is coming. As a knight you need to serve a king, and Voight fits my bill in COMING HOME. I watch and I want to help him do whatever it is he needs to do, because you know it's right and just, whatever it is. He becomes the sort of man that James Dean's character was on the road to becoming in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. He becomes a leader that inspires what is best in men.

Contrasting Voight in the film is Bruce Dern's character, a smarmy officer and Jane's husband. He embodies the Beatles' lyric heard in the film: "Living is easy with eyes closed..." and Bruce Dern is so good at portraying this type you fear for his soul. In short, he's odious. His character eventually loses out and goes for "the long swim" (if only he'd hung around awhile of course, he wouldn't have to worry--the Voights of the world lost to the banal conformity of the Derns after all). Too bad, because the pain he was feeling might have made him a better person if he just faced it rather than running. The Derns of the world don't ever face the mirror, they don't need to and so they don't, and then when they need to suddenly they can't - they'd rather off themselves than see how their unexamined life has left a shitty legacy.

Luke certainly has his work cut out for him in facing that mirror, learning to use the wheelchair, etc. all while being utterly reliant on others. There's a feeling of futility and angst surrounding his situation, and it reaches a head when he first crashes into Jane on her first day volunteering at the VA, sending his colostomy bag flying and humiliating him to the breaking point so that he goes on a furious tirade that would not be topped for sheer greatness until he himself topped it seven years later in RUNAWAY TRAIN. It's a rage that is so fierce it reaches alchemical-level heat and from its raging molten crucible comes a humility akin to divine grace.

Luke's humility in this film represents a path for men that was never overtly spelled out and so was lost in the shuffle when we went from subtle to sledgehammer in our cultural cum corporate aesthetic. If you look at old films--like Howard Hawks' in particular--they all depict an unspoken code of "good" behavior that men measure one another by; it's a code that operates free of gender and physical strength and asks only what was asked of Laertes in Hamlet: "To thine own self be true, and thus it follows as night follows day, thou cannot be false to any man." The path up to this heavenly ethical plateau is through things like therapy,  the 12 steps, meditation, volunteer work, helping others --all the shit we'd often rather die than deal with directly. But if we don't deal with it, it deals with us and we're back in the jungle or the desert faster than we can run. 

There's a great moment when Luke first gets asked to dinner by Jane and as she heads off-screen he slowly pulls himself up the hospital's wheelchair ramp, his newly muscled arms rippling as he pulls his wheelchair and bulk. Those muscles represent not just Voight's devotion to getting the details of his part right--and by association doing right by the paraplegics he studied for the role--they represent the triumph of love against the sort of rage and shame that he expressed earlier. Luke begins to grow like a flower in the sun of Jane Fonda; he will become a dad figure to Billy, the shell-shocked neurotic guitarist played by Robert Carradine; and he will become an inspiration even to a whole high school assembly at the film's climax.

What makes the final speech so moving and profound is not just his tears, but his acceptance of responsibility; he doesn't condemn Vietnam with the self-righteousness of a screaming protestor; he doesn't bemoan his loss. Instead he admits he "doesn't feel very good" about having killed people for "not enough reason, man." He doesn't blame the U.S., or the recruitment officer who spoke before him. He admits defeat and admits he made choices that he believes were wrong. In doing so, he begins the possibility for genuine social change. It's such a scary thought I believe the powers that be would just as soon this movie never existed, was forgotten, and overshadowed by the grim fatalism of The Deer Hunter.

Everyone celebrates and remembers Voight in that big final high school speech, so rather than discuss it further I'm going to delve a bit into their first date at Fonda's apartment: She's nervous and he orders her to sit down. He asks if this is "Bring a gimp over to dinner night," and rather than get indignant (a reaction which you see cross her face) she instead looks him directly in the eye and  slowly shakes her head no; the result is nothing short of a true human connection, and he connects back and admits, "I know you didn't."

In today's edit-happy world this scene would probably be cut down to a few seconds. Instead we're allowed to see each of them overcoming fears and prejudices, connecting as real people, and Ashby makes it possible for us to see this in a magnificent natural light that illuminates their eyes. He gives Voight and Fonda all the room they need to make these characters real. Even though we might squirm in embarrassment while it's happening, in the end we're in love with them as much as they are with each other; the kind of love that transcends sex and gender (literally since Luke is effectively sexless) the kind of love that spreads outwards to all who come in contact with it... except for the Bruce Derns, of course, living easy with their eyes closed.

Later in that same first date, Voight says to Fonda: "When people look at me they see something else, they don't see ... who I really am."  In real life, people still don't see Voight or Fonda as who they really are (I'm sure I'm not seeing Dern as he really is either). They see publicity and Angelina and Hanoi Jane and ANACONDA and whatever else. In 1978's COMING HOME we can feel the aperture of spirit close around us, feel our willingness to embrace the gossip rags rather than the unwritten riches, but first we get this wide open view of the human spirit at its most noble and compassionate... and yes, it can be painful to watch, especially for men. We're not comfortable seeing a man so dependent upon a woman (two words: wheelchair accessible) and COMING HOME lingers right on that sensitive spot, like a lover trying to tickle some embarrassing secret out of us while we're tied to the bed.

Is it any wonder then, that cinema fans in media-saturated 21st century prefer the cool macho alienation of THE DEER HUNTER? COMING HOME challenges us to be more open and loving with one another and it does so by practicing what it preaches; it gets all sticky and gooey, it "lapses into melodrama." It asks us to feel deeply. Conversely, THE DEER HUNTER asks us only to pop open another cold one and turn up the game; to drown out that subtle, soft voice that would point us towards the love we'd prefer to think irretrievable. If things get too intimate, just drown that sensitivity in another game of Russian roulette, like a real man.

And so Jon Voight in COMING HOME gets first place in the 1970s dad pantheon, without his character even having any kids... or even any legs...or the ability to ever walk or inseminate again. All he has are the guts to ask for help, and to love without limit, and to administer a cool beard... and he's beautiful. And I almost forgot: he's got such cunnilingual skills he gives Jane her first orgasm. As far as hostility towards this picture by mainstream society, that explains a hell of a lot.