The Glories of Grooviness

By J.C.

At first, Medicine Ball Caravan looks like another whelp from the Woodstock litter. The idea was to have some freaks travel cross-country in Day-Glo buses disseminating rock music, good vibes and easygoing propaganda for the counterculture. Warner Bros, would pack along a camera crew to record the music, the interaction and the scenery.

The caravan duly set forth in the summer of 1970, and the filmed record proceeds predictably enough for the first few minutes. Then Director Francois Reichenbach appears in an on-camera interview. As he goes into a number about the glories of grooviness, the film cuts abruptly to a very quick shot of a bus being thoroughly whitewashed.

That moment is an early signal that Medicine Ball Caravan is almost schizoid. One part celebrates the youth culture; another is a crafty send-up of the whole caravan project. There are, of course, the requisite number of elaborate rock concert sequences (B.B. King, Alice Cooper). There are also the usual nude bathing sequences, the dope sequences and the rapping-with-Middle-America sequences.

What prevents audience atrophy during all this is a recurring, if not pervasive sense of irony. Director Reichenbach appears throughout the film bobbing around and asking inane questions ("What means for you vibrations?") in heavily accented French. He becomes a buffoon in his own movie. Toward the end of Caravan, there is a long scene at Antioch College during which the students denounce the film makers as frauds, the caravan members as dupes and the executives of Warner Bros, as flat-out bandits. From the evidence at hand, it's hard to disagree. The gnomish sabotage of the film's basic premise was accomplished by Associate Producer Martin Scorsese, a moviemaker himself (Who's That Knocking at My Door?), who assembled Reichenbach's footage and added his own distinctive and sometimes corrosive point of view.

The two parts, however, make for a highly imperfect whole. As a musical and historical event, the caravan was a total bust. The film's best sequences are those-like Antioch, or a look at a family of Colorado speed freaks dressed as cavemen-in which the tie-dyed patina of the whole project is mocked. But such moments are few. Which is a pity, because as a piece of deliberate self-parody Medicine Ball Caravan could have been fascinating. . J.C.

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