Strawberries, Cool, and Joe

While I was in high school, some forward-thinking teacher showed us the movie The Strawberry Statement, in class. It stuck with me, so much so that I later found a used copy of the book it was based on, by James Kunen. It’s set in ’68 during the student protests and the takeover of the administration building at Columbia University.

In hindsight, it’s easy to think the anti-war position was a popular view, but in a very immediate way The Strawberry Statement brings home how embattled they were, how much of a minority they felt (the jocks, for example, called them “pukes”), and not just the spontaneity of the moment but a feeling of newness, or everything being up for grabs.

Later, in college, I saw Medium Cool at the student union. By the time I got to college the protests were long over and the good times of a liberal era were rolling. So anything to do with the unrest was easily swathed in the sepia-toned romantic glow that revolution can have if the riot gear isn’t out and the billy clubs aren’t swinging.

Medium Cool is also amateurish by our standards. It involves the Chicago riots of ’68, the role of the media, especially TV. There are obvious rough spots or gaffes, but it has an honest and earnest quality I find very endearing. I listened to the director’s commentary, and found out the TV talking heads at the beginning were all actual Chicago TV anchors at the time. The role of TV was still up in the air, and they are considering their roles in a way we, in our post-Ted Baxter world, give little weight.

So it’s a good blend of actors and real people. The story is interesting, too, involving a West Virginia family moved to Chicago who get caught in the reporter’s world, their Appalachian views on the roles of men and women, and real life footage of the riots.

The director, Haskell Wexler, had actually filmed the national guard preparing for the ’68 convention months earlier in Michigan. Guardsmen in wigs playing the roles of hippies and protesters so they can practice their tactics — all real stuff. The plot involves the family caught up in the protest, Mom searching for her son, and Wexler’s scenes of her in a red dress running through the protests, looking for her son, have a vivid innocence. It’s antiquated filmmaking, but all very earnest.

In one scene they’ve gotten permission from blacks to visit a part of Chicago’s south side, only not everyone got the word. One actor goes into a drugstore to buy cigarettes and when he comes out is confronted by a local. It’s caught on camera, a young black comes up and asks him what he’s doing here and tells him not to come into this neighborhood again — it ain’t acting, it’s real.

Odd to see Peter Boyle, Jesse Jackson, and Studs Terkel in one movie, so long ago and so much younger. Amazing to think they made a movie of it at all, overlaying their plot on that anarchic and violent backdrop. At the end, during the credits, they run an audio recording of some poor middle-aged guy visiting the town who had no sympathy for the peaceniks until he gets beat up by the police and he is raging his anger, a livid convert to the cause.

Plus, I liked the soundtrack. For days afterward I had the theme music running through my head, a cool insistence, dramatic yet under-stated bass, percussive and steady, with a wry tone.

Did I say it was amateurish in an earnest way? They even included homing pigeons. The screenwriter and filmmaker deliberately used the birds as both part of the plot and as a peace symbol. C’mon — it was released in 1969.

So for years I’ve had those two movies in my head, as representative of what gets called “the sixties” as a sort of shorthand for the politics of the end of the decade. (What would be representative of the first 2/3rds of the decade, 1960 to 1966? Breakfast at Tiffany’s? A Hard Day’s Night? Doris Day? Star Trek? It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World?)

I’ve looked for The Strawberry Statement, but it isn’t on Netflix’s list, and have never seen it in a video store. (Odd, in one sense, as the City of New York wouldn’t let them film there, so it was actually filmed here in the SF Bay Area.)

I’ve kept my eyes peeled for any other movie that caught the zeitgeist, especially the politics of the time, in any real way.

And then Peter Boyle died, sometime around New Years. In his obit I read about the first movie he starred in Joe, and put it on our Netflix list, where it was a “long wait” before we got it. And it was excellent! I never knew Susan Sarandon was ever so young. She’s a bit air-headed as the hippie dippy daughter, but I suppose there were people like that.

Boyle, as the blue-collar WW2 vet up in arms and speaking out against “the kids these days” is great. From our perspective he can seem over the top, but if you lived through it you can appreciate how well he captures the ethos of the time.

Later in life Peter Boyle spoke of how odd it was to have people come up and tell him how much they loved and agreed with the character Joe, never suspecting that his views were the opposite of the character’s.

While the first two movies are good interior views of a subculture, Joe better captures the larger cultural issues of the time. I haven’t seen The Strawberry Statement for over 30 years — but that it’s difficult to find probably has something to do with the deficiencies of its plot. I think it’s safe to say Joe has the best plot of the three, as well. So it now tops my personal list as the best movie about the late, political 1960s.

But I’d love to consider any others anyone else can think of. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

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