Word: semis
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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RADICALS view American society as being dominated by a relatively small group of people--an elite, more or less tightly co-ordinated, that benefits considerably from the present system. Under this upper crust lies a vast semi-oppressed white lumpenproletariat and a clearly oppressed black proletariat...
...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...
Both films suffer from scriptwriters' inability to go beyond a simple extrapolation of the hippie into already familiar contexts: Alice B. Toklas might just as well be called Nichols and May Meet The Flower Children, its frame of reference entirely consisting of semi-improvised Jewish comedy prevalent in Neil Simon and lesser Feiffer. Runaways is structurally a simplistic morality play juggling black-and-white moral quantities with the vengeance of a true confessions magazine...
...Great White Hope, by Howard Sackler, is a sprawling, episodic semi-documentary that traces the rise and fall of Jack Johnson, the first Negro heavyweight champion of the world. In the play he is called Jack Jefferson, and James Earl Jones roars through the role with the jungle magnetism and pride of a lion. In a concentrated off-Broadway apprenticeship, Jones often played a kind of jolly brown giant; here he plays an avenging black one. Jones is not the kind of actor who buries himself in a part. Instead, he devours the part and then radiates its presence...
...Squad"' is like that -- details with a veneer of Now, dripping with unintended Significance, a meaning that is either funny but scary too. The handling of L.S.D., for example: We see the girl at the end of her trip. She is semi-conscious, lolling about on a bed and moaning, as if, in fact, she had drunk too much, or taken too many tranquilizers. She is discovered in this state by a Mod Squader, and a doctor is summoned. He injects something into her and in a few moments she wakes up. Like all the good adults on the show...