Still fascinating ...almost 40 years later......

I graduated college the month this came out....with the entire populace of the United States literally at each
other's throats over Vietnam...black vs. white, young vs.old, liberal vs.
conservative....forget the geographic boundries of the War Between The States...this was a civil war raging in almost every single household in America. Also opening around the same time was another campus revolution film
"The Strawberry Statement"...
But "Strawberry" was a hazy marshmellow of a film, directed by some
TV commercial non-entity who had just moved up from directing...TV commercials.
"Getting Straight" was another story altogether....slam-dunked with propulsive
force by Richard Rush...with all the energy and action he brought to his
biker/exploitation movies.
Watching it again a few days ago, I was amazed at how well it holds up
and how compulsively watchable it remains....and I think I know why. Rush looked on the whole campus revolution/social strife of his era with the
jaundiced eye of a bruised Hollywood cynic.....the kids depicted as sweetly
naive and foolish, just waiting to get their heads cracked with nightsticks...and the adults as imbecilic buffoons, desperately clinging to the
status quo..(Rush will even visually warp them,photographing the school President with a fisheye lens) Quite a distanced overview, considering he made this movie right in the middle of the incendiary era its displaying.
But when we finally arrive at the campus riot, we go right to the center of Rush's dark heart....(look at the credits, notice how stunt director Chuck
Bail gets a prominent credit) Rush finally arrives at something he connects with...America's love affair with violence...the sequence is still stunning in its force and random cruelty...Bail's stunt team puts on a spectacular Arena-like display of a society that has hit the boiling point.
And as Gould's character wildly shifts from saddened idealist to
sex-driven shlub, Rush's relentless shifting focus camera changes right along
with him....the never ending focus shifts perfectly compliment Rush's
you-can't-hit-a-moving-target points of view.
(And it's only just now that I noticed that guy who plays the
dunderheaded University P.R. guy also played Officer Krupke in "West Side
Story"...how wonderfully symmetrical...)