You're a Bad Movie, But I Love You Just the Same

I believe everyone is entitled to love a movie that is — to be blunt — not very good. For me that picture is The Strawberry Statement (1970).

First let’s look at the problems with it for they are legion. Broadly it needed a much better director. This was the first feature for Stuart Hagmann who had previously directed three TV episodes. He followed Strawberry Statement with one more feature film, one episode of a TV series and two TV movies the second of which was called Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo. IMDb users have it rated at 4.6 and that’s out of ten not five. Suffice to say that Hagmann might be a very nice bloke but his talents lie elsewhere. The Strawberry Statement is a hodgepodge of scenes that are badly edited and lack cohesion. It was his first shot at a feature and he decided to go artsy fartsy. He should have simply told the story.

Speaking of the story, the script probably could have used some work too. Hold on, now that I think about it the script could have been a work of art, who can tell when a hack gets a hold of it?

The Strawberry Statement is about a young university student  (Bruce Davison) who joins the student  protest movement at a fictional university in San Francisco. Along the way he finds love in the person of a fellow revolutionary (Kim Darby). The cast also includes Bob Balaban and Bud Cort. Our hero also rows for the college crew and he juggles that with his  interest in the coming revolution. He’s at odds with one of his fellow jocks which make for some wincingly bad scenes. Many characters are cardboard cutouts.

So how is it that I like this mess? I’m glad I asked.

Part of it is nostalgia. I first saw Strawberry Statement in its initial theatrical run in 1970. I was a budding young revolutionary (with not very refined tastes in cinema) and thought it was fantastic. (My wife saw it three times when it first came out so it made quite an impression on us young folks.) This points to something else about the film: it does a masterful job — for all its faults — of capturing a time, place and mood. This is in great part aided by one of the greatest soundtracks a film has ever boasted. It features one of the most iconic Sixties ballads of all time, Thunderclap Newman’s Something in the Air along with from Buffy St. Marie’s The Circle Game, The Beatles’ Give Peace a Chance and plenty from Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Indeed The Strawberry Statement often seems like a series of music videos loosely connected by a little bit of story.

So this is a movie that — at least for those of us who lived then — evokes the Sixties, the protest movement and what it was like to be young as our culture was going through dramatic changes. 

Davison, who has had an impressive acting career, is excellent as Simon, the naive student who tries to straddle two worlds and make sense of the the war with the establishment. From Something in the Air:

Call out the instigators

Because there's something in the air

We got to get together sooner or later

Because the revolution's here

And you know it's right

And you know that it's right

We have got to get it together

We have got to get it together now

There most definitely was “something in the air” and a revolution of sorts was very much on the table and Simon did in fact know “that it’s right.”

You’d be forgiven for wondering “what revolution?” Okay so there wasn’t a revolution in the sense of a political takeover. Nixon won re-election in a landslide in ’72 and after Watergate gave the country a jolt, the Reagan Revolution came along in 1980. But there was very much a revolution, in mores, attitudes and our culture as a whole. Second wave feminism, Gay Liberation, early political correctness that didn’t censor but kept incendiary language out of the public arena, the questioning of authority, sexual liberation and more can be attributed to the Sixties. And in fact another thing The Strawberry Statement does so well is show the many fronts people were fighting on. Opposition to the war in Vietnam and to the draft were the main targets but there was also the battles against racism and sexism. The struggles for social justice and equality were paramount as was giving a voice and power to the marginalized. This often led to fractionalization which practically crippled the New Left. One reason for the success of right wing movements is their effectiveness at staying on a few core messages that they all back. The left almost had too many voices and certainly too many ideas for how to carry out the struggle.

The Strawberry Statement is a mess but in a way that helps it get across the message. The Sixties were in many respects a mess. The counter revolutionary forces were powerful and were led by the FBI. There was great resistance that people like Reagan tapped into from those who were living a version of the American Dream and were offended by those who rocked the boat. There were epic failures on the left but there were was also great progress. The Strawberry Statement conveys some of the difficulty in getting across messages and toppling the power structure but it also shows the nobility of carrying out that struggle. And by the way, the closing shot from the climactic mass arrest is brilliant. I wish the rest of the film had, cinematically, lived up to it.