Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These are excellent films which should not be hidden away in vaults. Their makers deserve all the support and publicity that more publicity-minded but not necessarily more excellent film-makers of Harvard have monopolized for too long, and to everyone's detriment...
...film-makers die, and the industry busily replaces its craftsmen with product-mongers who think only of mass audience and TV sales. Contemporary social phenomena, prevented from developing in peace, are instantly exploited by a Hollywood desperate to be the first on the marketing bandwagon. Thus Hollywood supplies a hippie to the curious netherworld between San Francisco and New York--a hippie one step closer to reality than John Wayne's faceless chattering Vietcong, but already a stock figure for a director to plug into any context available...
WELL, OKAY, on one level it's a simple cashing-in on cliche; certainly Hollywood provides a hippie guaranteed to satisfy any Kansas housewife steeped in instinctive hatred of a human species more reprehensible than the red menace. But given the lasting power of the film image, we are perhaps witnessing the commercial creation of a breed of hippie at the expense of the real animal. Assuming that the hippie movement goes the way of the flappers and beatniks, we run the risk of seeing them in fifty years only as they were given us by the commercial American cinema...
...these gentle frauds are in town this week. The cheaper is Arthur Dreifuss's The Young Runaways, produced by Sam Katzman, a second-rate Albert Zugsmith whose films are usually acted by racing cars. Inadvertantly, Runaways does more toward creating a semi-mythic subculture than Alice B. Toklas, in its strict adherence to the plot premise: everybody in The Young Runaways has runaways on their mind. It is as if Chicago, the film's location, were a vast playground given over to hide-and-seek...
NONETHELESS, the potential for new formula exists in these films. We are familiar with the story of the country innocent corrupted by the wicked city, a plot-type appearing frequently from Griffith's Way Down East through Chabrol's Les Cousins. Hollywood has begun to alter this: the conclusion of the product-mongers appears to be that innocence--at least sexual innocence--no longer exists anywhere, certainly not in the country. Hollywood is probably right: God knows they helped make it that way, and God know there's no money to be made in innocence. The three runaways in Dreifuss...