A Mid-'60s Night's Dream

By Frank Rich

HAIR Directed by Milos Forman; Screenplay by Michael Weller

The film version of Hair is proof that real miracles can happen in show business. If ever a project looked doomed, it was this one. Hair's source, the 1968 Broadway hit, was a largely plotless, if tuneful, show that homogenized the '60s for theater audiences; even at the time, it was dated. The movie's creators --Czech-born Director Milos Forman, Playwright Michael Weller, Choreographer Twyla Tharp--have never previously negotiated the perilous tides of movie musicals. Add a largely unproven cast and a grand budget, and you can see just how hairy an undertaking this movie was. One false move, and Hair would have congealed into Grease.

There are no false moves. Hair succeeds at all levels--as lowdown fun, as affecting drama, as exhilarating spectacle and as provocative social observation. It achieves its goals by rigorously obeying the rules of classic American musical comedy: dialogue, plot, song and dance blend seamlessly to create a juggernaut of excitement. Though every cut and camera angle in Hair appears to have been carefully conceived, the total effect is spontaneous. Like the best movie musicals of the '50s (Singin' in the Rain) and the '60s (A Hard Day's Night), Hair leaps from one number to the next. Soon the audience is leaping too.

Scenarist Weller is best known for Moonchildren, his fine, reflective play about lost renegades of the '60s. He has written Hair as a witty cross between A Midsummer Night's Dream and the 1949 MGM musical On the Town. The story begins as Claude (John Savage, of The Deer Hunter), an Oklahoma farm boy, arrives in Manhattan for a final day of liberty before induction into the Army. Like the World War II sailors of On the Town, Claude plans to take in the tourist sights, but he is quickly seduced by more hedonistic pleasures. Falling in with a tribe of long-haired dropouts, he soon discovers countercultural drugs and politics. Thanks to a whimsically funny plot twist, he also falls in love with Sheila (the voluptuous but innocent Beverly D'Angelo), a debutante he gallantly rescues from the upper-crust sobriety of Short Hills, N.J.

If portrayed literally, Claude's odyssey to self-awareness would be as hokey as Hollywood's "trip" movies of the '60s, like Easy Rider. Instead, Hair presents the decade in the terms of balletic myth. The passions of a generation are poured into a single setting, Central Park, on a single enchanted night. The park becomes an idealized, but never sentimentalized, recreation of the brief-lived Utopias that once sprang up in Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and the East Village. Yet Weller does not get carried away by his conceit. His characters talk like people, not platitudinous flower children, and their all too innocent dream does not last forever. Eventually the tribe must leave its forest idyl behind to confront the wintry realities of a society gripped by an irrational war.

Weller has not only translated the recent past into a creative vision, but he has also mastered the difficult craft of musical screenwriting. His spare, precise dialogue always lets the songs and dances advance the movie's story and meaning. He has done this job so brilliantly that the Gait MacDermot-James Rado-Gerome Ragni score, though virtually unchanged, carries far more dramatic, satirical and emotional weight than it did on the stage. Aquarius is now Hair 's equivalent to On the Town 's New York, New York opening: it simultaneously defines the film's characters and relationships, its stylistic plan and emotional tone. The show's novelty numbers (Sodomy, Black Boys) now have narrative and thematic functions that bring resonance to their facile lyrics. MacDermot's music is still closer to Tin Pan Alley than rock, but with the help of strong voices and orchestrations, it is rich in theatrical color.

Forman executes the numbers with a resourcefulness that never flags. His camera and editing are in perfect harmony with Tharp's shaggily informal dance patterns; rarely has a musical's choreography flowed so naturally out of the movement of its nonmusical scenes.

Though the cast is high-powered, the director dominates the movie. Here, for the first time, Forman has fused the sweet good humor of his Czech comedies with the energy of his One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Hair's first showstopper, I Got Life, which is also a homage to Forman's previous film about '60s runaways, Taking Off (1971). When Berger (Treat Williams), the leader of the tribe, crashes a society party and then dances across a long, lavishly set luncheon table, the director creates a riotous but somehow benign paradigm of deadlocked cultural confrontation.

Blessed with an immigrant's sense of objectivity, Forman also does right by the adults and authority figures who appear in Hair. Parents, preppies and even some Army officers are treated as generously as the young rebels. Nor are the two groups all that different: the tribe members come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds. Though Sheila gradually sheds her straight wardrobe, she never quite loses her suburban mores.

Claude's first acid visions are not of psychedelic rainbows but of home, church, marriage and happiness ever after.

Still, this point is not made at the expense of the decade's genuine divisions.

When Claude goes into basic training, Hair meets the war head on. Once again, song and dance are the vehicles of expression, and, amazingly enough, the anger of the time is conveyed without trivialization or pretension. Rather than bring battle carnage into their musical, which would be tasteless, the film makers unleash their arsenal of art. In the spectacularly edited finale, The Flesh Failures/ Let the Sunshine In, Forman at once resolves the plot, reopens the national wounds of Viet Nam and pulls back to bring the whole movie into a historical perspective.

It is a shocking, knockout blow, but, aesthetically speaking, it is not below the belt. Even when Hair crashes from the blissful dreams of the '60s into the nightmares, it never loses its pulsating musical heartbeat.

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