Andy Hardy Gets Busted

Up against the wall, MGM. They have taken James Simon Kunen's straightforward memoirs of the 1968 Columbia riots and turned them into a homogenized and dishonest movie about student politics whose central thesis is that the kids are only in it for the action --the sexy action. The Strawberry Statement has about as much to do with Kunen's book as the film The Ten Commandments had to do with the tablets.

The film's hero is Simon James (Bruce Davidson), a stalwart on the university rowing team with only a passing interest in political agitation. Radical students call for a strike against the university's plan to put up an ROTC headquarters on a playground, while James and his teammates scull on the river. Two chants ring in our hero's ears: "Stroke!" and "Strike!", surely a more suitable title for this simpleminded exercise. James chooses the latter. It is never explained why, exactly, although it seems to have something to do with the nubile presence of Linda (Kim Darby), with whom, as James announces proudly, "I slept last night in the president's office. Of course, there were 50 other people there, too."

The strike is doomed to failure, and small wonder. James chases after Linda until there is little time left for political ideas. Finally the cops wade in heavily with tear gas, and the kids, all neatly assembled on the floor in an intricate and improbable circular flower design, are soundly beaten and busted. Although this is the strongest scene in a lackluster film, it will vastly amuse any one who has ever been gassed. The film shows the kids sitting for minutes while great billows of gas waft around them. They cough, but they do not move, a feat that is virtually impossible without a mask.

The Circle Game. The film espouses no ideology whatsoever, preferring to concentrate on the boy-meets-girl saga. Director Stuart Hagmann, making his film debut after a few years' training in television, seems to have decided that the dominant image of the film is Indians v. the wagon train, so he and his cinematographer lose not a single opportunity to have the camera track 360DEG around the principals. He stuffs the film with other round-and-round imagery (a carrousel, the pattern of the protesters on the floor) while the sound track drives the point home with constant repetitions of a rock tune called The Circle Game. It is all obviously meant to symbolize constriction and futility; what it spells out even more resoundingly is absolute poverty of invention.

Negligible as a piece of film making, The Strawberry Statement is an interesting study in Hollywood exploitation, a classic "rip-off," as kids these days refer to robbery. The film makers ignored the issue of campus politics (the one real revolutionary is portrayed as a speed freak who wears an eye patch and talks like a paranoid Long John Silver), and produced something that might be called Andy Hardy Gets Busted. A few more films like Getting Straight (TIME, May 18) and The Strawberry Statement, and students may begin occupying what is left of MGM's offices instead of the campus administration building.

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