Gould\u2019s Harry Bailey in Getting Straight<\/em> isn\u2019t explicitly characterized as Jewish, but how can we read Elliott Gould as anything else? He\u2019s 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\u2019s 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, \u201cIt was cold out there.\u201d) Harry still wants to make a difference and feels like his best chance to do that is by reaching younger, underprivileged students. He\u2019s even got a good shot at graduating, so long as he can keep sidestepping the sticky campus politics that are swirling all around him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The students are up in arms because they want overnight guest privileges and a Black Studies department, but mostly they\u2019re 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\u2019s been there, he\u2019s done that. He also owes the university bursar too much money and his shitbox car is falling apart and he\u2019s 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 \u201cyou can measure ding-a-lings with the Establishment because they allow it.\u201d But it looks like the school won\u2019t be sitting still for these shenanigans much longer, as soon they\u2019re calling in the National Guard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Getting Straight<\/em> opened the same week as the massacre at Kent State, and it\u2019s 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\u2019d 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<\/em> as well as every filmmaker\u2019s favorite movie The Stunt Man<\/em><\/a>. He remains relatively unsung among regular folks but a deity to serious cinephiles. (Word was that Ingmar Bergman became obsessed with Getting Straight<\/em> and watched it constantly before casting Gould in The Touch<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a great movie if you\u2019ve ever felt like you were caught between two cohorts. Harry\u2019s too old to seriously commit to these kids\u2019 crusade, but not yet ready to settle down in suburbia with the white-haired, out-of-touch elders of academia. He\u2019s a guy who dearly believes in social justice, but he\u2019s also exhausted and has bills to pay. All these emotions are roiling around Gould\u2019s acerbic, hugely charismatic performance that \u2013 to the movie\u2019s credit \u2013 never makes Harry into an oracle or a sage. In fact, most of the time he\u2019s a shit. Blustery and riddled with all sorts of unexamined issues about women and gays, he\u2019s a grandstanding blowhard. But because of the way Gould plays him, Harry\u2019s our<\/em> grandstanding blowhard, and he\u2019s usually on the side of the angels when he can get out of his own way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rush and the legendary cinematographer Lazlo Kovacs shot the movie as a ballet of tortuously choreographed dialogue scenes with the lens\u2019 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 \u2013 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Harry\u2019s simply awful to his girlfriend, played by Candice Bergen in an early, fumbling performance in a role that\u2019s not quite there for her. She\u2019s a country club, cheerleader type trying on a social consciousness for the first time, and it\u2019s 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 \u2013 one of them even asks him to write down a list of books for her to check out from the library \u2013 and sometimes it\u2019s hard to tell if the movie is commenting on the character\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a small but very funny performance by an impossibly young and shaggy Harrison Ford as Bergen\u2019s zonked neighbor across the hall, and he seems to know instinctively that he should be handling Harry with kid gloves. \u201cAlways remember, anyone over thirty is your enemy,\u201d our hero informs a tour group of high school students visiting the university, knowing far too well that he\u2019s 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<\/em> is what\u2019s going to blow up first, Harry or the school? Maybe not everybody is cut out for academia. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/getting-straight-1024x576.jpg\")
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