Between Two Schools

Revolution has gone to college to get its decree, and the phenomenon has not escaped the makers of Getting Straight. With cynical dispatch, they have trained a high-powered telescope on that bit of scorched earth known as the radicalized campus. But in their haste to capitalize on the avalanche of recent headlines, the planners made one miscalculation: they are peering down the wrong end. The people are turned into midgets, major issues are trivialized, and what might have been incisive farce is turned into insult comedy.

Viet Nam Veteran Harry Bailey (Elliott Gould) returns to a university for his M.A. in education. Older than the New Left, younger than the Old Guard, Harry falls between two schools. Ideologically unencumbered, he teaches the joys of lit. to a class of semiliterate teenagers--and the joys of sex to Jan (Candice Bergen). But before anyone can say Mark Rudd or Ronald Reagan, the campus is aflame, cops begin beating on kids, and though Harry quietly rejects the stance of the radicals, he maniacally attacks the pose of the administration. Seething at Harry's rebellion, a ring of professors conspires to bar him from the teaching profession. Not that Harry minds. "It's not what you do," he declares staunchly, "it's what you are!"

Like Lightbulbs. That motto is typical of Robert Kaufman's pseudosociological scenario, which mistakes words for thoughts and bruises for incisions. ("You're not a woman," yells Harry at Jan. "You're just a guy with a hole in the middle!") When the hero finds a Mexican-American student reading a comic book, he encourages him to study a higher work of similar intent. Back comes a note. "I finish Bat/nan and because of what Mr. Bailey say I go to the library and read Don Quixote." Anyone who believes that those two opuses can be negotiated with a single step understands neither Cervantes nor Bob Kane.

The dialogue is merely specious; it is the attitudes that are openly corrupt. The film's war protester is Junkie Nick Filbert (Robert F. Lyons). To avoid the draft he woos a black woman with a large family, tries to flee to Canada, and attempts to convince an Army examiner that he is a raving queer. When none of the dodges work, he enlists in the Marines and becomes more gung-ho than John Wayne, only to slip back to his spaced-out civilian soul when he is pronounced psychologically unfit. The only implication left is that antiwar demonstrators can be mechanically switched on and off.

Plaster Castinq. Getting Straight would thus seem to be aimed at the silent majority, but that would be crediting it with a species of integrity; the film is out for everyone's patronage regardless of taste or creed. Suddenly arguing for the dissenters, Bailey screams at the college president: "You can't hold back the hands on the clock; they'll rip your arms off!"

If the film refuses to take sides with its characters, it adopts a firm stand toward its actors: it is against them. Producer-Director Richard Rush sets his cast at shriek level. Even the elegant Candice Bergen, who at last seems ready to break through plaster casting (The Magus, The Adventurers), is given too much to yell and not enough to say. Elliott Gould is a natural clown; his hands are an act in themselves, and his hair seems to be coiling for a strike. Yet only once does Getting Straight allow him an original scene. At the oral exam for his degree, Harry Bailey is called upon to defend his thesis. The conversation shifts to a discussion of The Great Gatsby, and soon a professor trots out his own thesis-- that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a homosexual. The voices grow louder and the arguments more indistinct, simultaneously reducing hero --and institution--to victims.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.