Sean Burns
No image crystalizes a particular moment in American cinema quite like a walrus-mustached Elliott Gould shouting down an authority figure. Director Richard Rush’s antic campus insurrection comedy Getting Straight hit movie screens a few months after Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H in 1970, when Gould was still flying high as Time Magazine’s “Star for an Uptight Age.” He wasn’t like other matinee idols. As with Dustin Hoffman and soon to be followed by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Gould was a terribly nervous and unsettled leading man, urban and ethnic in ways Hollywood movies had not previously allowed. Fans flocked to see Paul Newman and Robert Redford, but here was someone a good deal more neurotic and complicated. (Or, to quote Tina Fey on 30 Rock whenever Alec Baldwin’s character complained about East Coast intellectuals, “Jack, just say ‘Jewish,’ this is taking all day.”)
Gould’s Harry Bailey in Getting Straight isn’t explicitly characterized as Jewish, but how can we read Elliott Gould as anything else? He’s an overbearing, motor-mouthed grad student struggling to get his teaching certificate, a good deal older than his classmates and ill at ease around a lot of them. Harry’s a Vietnam Vet who marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, but after dropping out for several years has decided to drop back in and is trying to give the dreaded system another try. (He brusquely explains away his gap years by saying, “It was cold out there.”) Harry still wants to make a difference and feels like his best chance to do that is by reaching younger, underprivileged students. He’s even got a good shot at graduating, so long as he can keep sidestepping the sticky campus politics that are swirling all around him.
The students are up in arms because they want overnight guest privileges and a Black Studies department, but mostly they’re trying to exercise some sort of autonomy and self-rule at a time when all their peers are being fed into a meat grinder of a war nobody wants to be fighting. Harry gets it. He’s been there, he’s done that. He also owes the university bursar too much money and his shitbox car is falling apart and he’s so far behind on rent his landlady is changing the locks. Gould encourages his classmates without ever explicitly committing to their cause. He kids them about how college is the only place where “you can measure ding-a-lings with the Establishment because they allow it.” But it looks like the school won’t be sitting still for these shenanigans much longer, as soon they’re calling in the National Guard.
Getting Straight opened the same week as the massacre at Kent State, and it’s entirely possible that at that particular moment nobody considered campus radicals a laughing matter. This was the first studio movie directed by Richard Rush, who’d cut his teeth on scores of anarchic drug-and-motorcycle youth pictures for Roger Corman and understood the zeitgeist better than pretty much anybody. Rush went on to direct the self-parodic, two-hour trigger-warning Freebie and the Bean as well as every filmmaker’s favorite movie The Stunt Man. He remains relatively unsung among regular folks but a deity to serious cinephiles. (Word was that Ingmar Bergman became obsessed with Getting Straight and watched it constantly before casting Gould in The Touch.)
It’s a great movie if you’ve ever felt like you were caught between two cohorts. Harry’s too old to seriously commit to these kids’ crusade, but not yet ready to settle down in suburbia with the white-haired, out-of-touch elders of academia. He’s a guy who dearly believes in social justice, but he’s also exhausted and has bills to pay. All these emotions are roiling around Gould’s acerbic, hugely charismatic performance that – to the movie’s credit – never makes Harry into an oracle or a sage. In fact, most of the time he’s a shit. Blustery and riddled with all sorts of unexamined issues about women and gays, he’s a grandstanding blowhard. But because of the way Gould plays him, Harry’s our grandstanding blowhard, and he’s usually on the side of the angels when he can get out of his own way.
Rush and the legendary cinematographer Lazlo Kovacs shot the movie as a ballet of tortuously choreographed dialogue scenes with the lens’ rack focus functioning as an editing room of its own. (Gould has credited his background in dance as the only way he was able to hit his marks during the intricately designed shots.) Lane Community College in Bend, Oregon stands in for the unnamed California university, and the place is a ghastly wonder of brutalist architecture – all glass walls and ugly, imposing slabs of thick concrete. Rush and Kovacs shoot so many scenes around outcropped corners and through the slats of stairs, the school becomes a literal impediment to these characters.
Harry’s simply awful to his girlfriend, played by Candice Bergen in an early, fumbling performance in a role that’s not quite there for her. She’s a country club, cheerleader type trying on a social consciousness for the first time, and it’s hard for him to conceal his contempt. Unless he needs a place to crash. Gould scores with a spectacular array of beautiful women in this movie – one of them even asks him to write down a list of books for her to check out from the library – and sometimes it’s hard to tell if the movie is commenting on the character’s misogyny or reveling in it. Filed under stuff you would never see in a movie today: a purring, post-coital Bergen stroking his massive mustache with her toes, plus a comely coed seductively running her fingers thorough the hair on his shoulders.
There’s a small but very funny performance by an impossibly young and shaggy Harrison Ford as Bergen’s zonked neighbor across the hall, and he seems to know instinctively that he should be handling Harry with kid gloves. “Always remember, anyone over thirty is your enemy,” our hero informs a tour group of high school students visiting the university, knowing far too well that he’s crossed that Rubicon himself some time ago. Harry comes in too hot on every conversation, so as the troops file in to maintain order at the university, the big suspense in Getting Straight is what’s going to blow up first, Harry or the school? Maybe not everybody is cut out for academia. 
“Getting Straight” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
