'THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT'...........WHEN CAMPUS LIFE WAS A RIOT.......

The Strawberry Statement (1970)  As we mentioned in our previous posts about 1970's WUSA and Getting Straight, it took a few years for Hollywood studios to finally crank out some films that addressed America's churning social and political turmoil......an overflowing boiling pot of violence and tragedy fueled by assassinations, riots in cities and colleges and the ongoing horror of Vietnam......

             This movie arrived around the same time as "Getting Straight", which was a film mostly constructed around the Broadway Showstopper performance of 1970's rebel-du-jour Elliot Gould....

              Dated as "Getting Straight" might be, it's still watchable due to Gould's chew-up-the-scenery acting and director Richard Rush's relentless, shifting-focus visuals....

              "The Strawberry Statement" has none of those benefits, with its storyline and actors sabotaged and undone by Stuart Hagmann's up-the-minute (for l970), ultra hip, cross-cutting from hell direction.....

               In case anyone forgot about this woeful filmmaking style (which forever doomed many
1970's movies to remain blessedly forgotten).....it involved a lot of random, pointless jump cuts in the middle of scenes......oooh boy, did it ever seem cool at the time.

                 Over a decade later, music video directors would adopt this visual tossed salad as a vital part of their vocabulary.......where it still flourishes today......(and the popstars are more than welcome to it....

               But in a movie that aspires to chronicle a college boy's transformation from crew rowing, skirt-chasing jock to committed revolutionary, Hagmann's chopped up, oh-so-clever rapid fire visuals provide nothing more than an annoying distraction.........and dates the movie so severely, it makes the film a virtual museum piece.

             Crew guy Simon (Bruce Davison) ends up in a dean's office sit in only to pursue a cutie (Kim Darby) who caught his eye........after a slew of Hagmann's TV commercial montages, layered over with the latest rock songs, he's fully converted to protesting Vietnam and racist campus policies.....(he only wavers slightly into dejected nihilism after a black thug crushes his little Kodak movie camera....)

             The student rebels come across as feckless, naive and self-absorbed.....(very similar to the way they're depicted in "Getting Straight".)   Hagmann stages their first go-round with the cops like a comic, deleted scene from "A Hard Day's Night".......cops get pantsed and tossed around like toddlers......oh, those naughty kids.....

            But he's only warming up for the film's whole reason for existence.......a sustained tear gas,  billy-club bloodbath as the cops and National Guardsman lay waste to Davison, Darby and assembled rebels amidst their endless rendition of "Give Peace A Chance".....(ending, naturally, with that distinctive 1970's trope.......the freeze frame......)

            Interesting peer at.....(like a replica of a butter churn at a museum).....but this film needs to go back into the deep, deep archives from whence it came..... 1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2)....we're always willing to give peace a chance, but not this movie.......this 'Strawberry' is 47 years past its expiration date.....