Books, Arts & Manners: Hollywood and the Student Revolt

Spring is here, and in the spring a young man’s fancy turns to . . . campus revolution. Hollywood, ever ready to turn a social phenomenon into a movie genre (gangster melodramas, motorcycle exploiters), has sprung to the challenge of limning this particular Children’s Crusade on celluloid by spinning a bunch of Broadway straw into Culver City dental-floss. MGM took The Impossible Years, one of those indistinguishable comedies that give anyone unfamiliar with the banalities of Broadway humor a two-hour Excedrin headache; and before you could say “The Generation Gap makes me uptight, baby,” there was David Niven exhaling the garlicky one-liners once delivered by Alan King and Sam Levine, and the movie version was the Xmas offering at Radio City Music Hall, the Fillmore East of Norman Rockwell Land, along with the Music Hall’s big, boffo, bump-grind-and-genuflect Holiday Show.

Oddly enough, MGM’s attempt to woo both SDS and MRA with a quasicomedy that asks the musical questions “How did Niven’s bikini-clad daughter lose her virginity?” and “Did she actually carry a protest sign bearing That ****-Letter Word?” backfired. The Great Unwashed (most of whom are on the Left these days) ignored the picture; the Great Unread (movie critics) scored it; and the Great Unheeding (the movie-going public, what’s left of it) went away. Whether anybody enjoyed The Impossible Years is a fine point, the resolution of which must await the day when movie theaters offer to refund the admission price of any customer who feels he didn’t get his money’s worth. Nevertheless, Hollywood is sure to respond as soon as it can find another pre-sold novel or play that confronts the subject in as forthright a manner.

RC

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Richard Corliss

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Spring is here, and in the spring a young man’s fancy turns to . . . campus revolution. Hollywood, ever ready to turn a social phenomenon into a movie genre (gangster melodramas, motorcycle exploiters), has sprung to the challenge of limning this particular Children’s Crusade on celluloid by spinning a bunch of Broadway straw into Culver City dental-floss. MGM took The Impossible Years, one of those indistinguishable comedies that give anyone unfamiliar with the banalities of Broadway humor a two-hour Excedrin headache; and before you could say “The Generation Gap makes me uptight, baby,” there was David Niven exhaling the garlicky one-liners once delivered by Alan King and Sam Levine, and the movie version was the Xmas offering at Radio City Music Hall, the Fillmore East of Norman Rockwell Land, along with the Music Hall’s big, boffo, bump-grind-and-genuflect Holiday Show.

Oddly enough, MGM’s attempt to woo both SDS and MRA with a quasicomedy that asks the musical questions “How did Niven’s bikini-clad daughter lose her virginity?” and “Did she actually carry a protest sign bearing That ****-Letter Word?” backfired. The Great Unwashed (most of whom are on the Left these days) ignored the picture; the Great Unread (movie critics) scored it; and the Great Unheeding (the movie-going public, what’s left of it) went away. Whether anybody enjoyed The Impossible Years is a fine point, the resolution of which must await the day when movie theaters offer to refund the admission price of any customer who feels he didn’t get his money’s worth. Nevertheless, Hollywood is sure to respond as soon as it can find another pre-sold novel or play that confronts the subject in as forthright a manner.