Books, Arts & Manners: Of Pot and Pigs: The New Cinema

The American moviegoer is used to clichés. In fact, he enjoys them. The result is that the new rhetoric of the hippie cinema is rapidly anesthetizing the alleged liberalism of its master concepts. With MGM announcing a loss last year of some $36 million, and Paramount not far behind, shoestring cinema made with the aid of pimplecream pushers like Arlo Guthrie, or free kids found by the Perrys, will obviously attract perspiring front offices. Coming Apart . . . Three . . . John and Mary . . Bob and Carol . . . the variations are minor within the new mindlessness.

The new vocabulary of these movies insists that instead of the “good” cowboy discharging social debts—Buck Jones flailing his way across the prairies in a white hat—anyone who smokes pot is automatically good, and the evasion of such debts eminently desirable. Parenthetically, one observes that in that admirable elegy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the white hat belonged to the hired assassin (“Who can these guys be?” repeatedly asks “Butch,” Paul Newman. “How could they do such a thing?”). In Last Summer, freely adapted from an Evan Hunter fiction and lightly critical of such social irresponsibility, the young cop-outs smoke joints left handy by their parents, in their Fire Island pad.

GW

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Geoffrey Wagner

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The American moviegoer is used to clichés. In fact, he enjoys them. The result is that the new rhetoric of the hippie cinema is rapidly anesthetizing the alleged liberalism of its master concepts. With MGM announcing a loss last year of some $36 million, and Paramount not far behind, shoestring cinema made with the aid of pimplecream pushers like Arlo Guthrie, or free kids found by the Perrys, will obviously attract perspiring front offices. Coming Apart . . . Three . . . John and Mary . . Bob and Carol . . . the variations are minor within the new mindlessness.

The new vocabulary of these movies insists that instead of the “good” cowboy discharging social debts—Buck Jones flailing his way across the prairies in a white hat—anyone who smokes pot is automatically good, and the evasion of such debts eminently desirable. Parenthetically, one observes that in that admirable elegy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the white hat belonged to the hired assassin (“Who can these guys be?” repeatedly asks “Butch,” Paul Newman. “How could they do such a thing?”). In Last Summer, freely adapted from an Evan Hunter fiction and lightly critical of such social irresponsibility, the young cop-outs smoke joints left handy by their parents, in their Fire Island pad.