‘Youthsploitation’ films of the ’70s recall days of protest
When college campuses burned in the late ’60s and early ’70s as demonstrations over the Vietnam War and civil rights combusted into chaos, Hollywood’s game plan was simple: Make a buck off it. Youth-protest movies, largely forgotten now, became a short-lived subgenre — some call it “youthsploitation” — luring the Saturday-night masses with such lurid taglines as, “If you’re thirty, you’re through” and, “If you crack a head hard enough, you’ll hatch a revolutionary.”
Though there’s a wide variety of films that might loosely fit into this category — some were meant for the art house, others the grindhouse — they were, mostly, about and for white audiences flirting with the idea of counterculture. It wouldn’t be for another generation or two that Hollywood would start to explore black unrest with such movies as “Selma,” “Malcolm X” and “Detroit,” and that was partly due to the rise of black directors.
But a look back through the haze of the past half-century shows those early movies are instructive. And not just as showcases for questionable fashion choices. But as a way to see how the film industry commodified youth culture and offered early jobs to now well-known actors — Jeff Bridges, Richard Pryor, Harrison Ford, Candace Bergen, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, Rob Reiner, Malcolm McDowell — looking so young they’re barely recognizable.
Here, in rough chronological order, are 10 such films that, with three exceptions, are available on Amazon Prime. They vary wildly in concept and execution. But one thing’s for sure: They’re all groovy.
1. ‘Riot on Sunset Strip’ (1967)
Inspired by the real-life 1966 riot on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard — in which kids with bowl cuts and cops with billy clubs got crosswise over the closing of a favorite youth hangout, Pandora’s Box — this movie was rushed to theaters within months of the disturbance — and it shows. But its cheesiness is what gives it its flavor, from the dialog (“Dig those new wheels!”) to acting as wooden as a lumberyard. Bonus points for musical appearances from the Standells and the Chocolate Watch
Band.
2. ‘If ’ (1968)
In his first major film role, Malcolm McDowell plays a student at an all-boys British school who ends up leading a violent insurrection against the administration. In late-’60s England, director Lindsay Anderson’s film probably played more as absurdist fantasy while 21st-century Americans might interpret McDowell picking off his enemies at school as something closer to documentary.
3. ‘Wild in the Streets’ (1968)
Against a backdrop of teenage unrest, rock star Max
Frost (Christopher Jones) becomes president on a platform of lowering the voting age to 14 — the anthemic “Fourteen or Fight” is one of his big hits — and then forces everyone to retire at 30 and into re-education camps at 35. Sounds like a plan. That’s the plot for this hilariously pandering film with a cast that includes Pryor (as Max’s drummer), an out-of-control Shelley Winters and blink-andyou’ll-miss-’em appearances from Dick Clark, Barry Williams (Greg on “The Brady Bunch”) and Gary Busey. The movie was actually nominated for an Oscar for editing, but cooler heads prevailed and gave the award to “Bullitt.”
4. ‘Medium Cool’ (1969) Cinematographer/director Haskell Wexler blended fiction and reality in this story of a TV reporter covering the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago where protesters, during violent confrontations with the police, famously chanted, “The whole world is watching.” This chilling sentiment would be echoed years later with the release of the videos of Rodney King being beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department and George Floyd dying underneath the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Available on DVD and Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection.
5. ‘The Revolutionary’ (1970)
Jon Voight starred in this drama not long after coming to fame in “Midnight Cowboy,” but this was a very different movie. Set in a nameless country at a nameless time “somewhere in the free world,” it’s a stark, moody character study of a university student sinking deeper into radicalism. Despite its “hatch a revolutionary” slogan, it’s more of a slow-burn than a Molotov cocktail. And you get to see a young Robert Duvall.
6. ‘The Strawberry Statement’ (1970):
Loosely based on a nonfiction book about the riots that rocked Columbia University in 1968, this drama starred Bruce Davison as an apolitical member of the college crew team who ends up getting involved with radicalized students who’ve taken over one of the buildings. The film won a jury prize at Cannes but was mauled by many critics at the time who attacked it as major-studio appropriation of the student movement. One of the best things about it, though, is the soundtrack that includes Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Buffy Saint-Marie and Thunderclap Newman.
7. ‘Halls of Anger’ (1970): This film stands out from the rest — and not just because Jeff Bridges looks barely postpubescent and Rob Reiner plays a racist knucklehead. It’s student versus student as well as student versus authority when a busload of white, suburban high school kids are sent to an inner-city school with 3,000 black kids. But things really explode after a white teacher shoves a black teacher and tries to choke the life out of a black student, convulsing the whole school in protest.
8. ‘Zabriskie Point’ (1970) Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who took the film world by storm with his stylish “Blow Up” in 1966, returned four years later with what begins in the world of striking university students, journeys through a confrontation with a cop and ends as something of a love story in the California desert. Available on DVD.
9. ‘RPM’ (1970)
Director Stanley Kramer’s middle name should have been “message film” since he made such movies as “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “The Defiant Ones” and “Judgment at Nuremberg.” He tackled student unrest in this film — whose title, of course, stands for “revolutions per minute” — starring Anthony Quinn as a liberal college professor who’s appointed president and then has to figure out how to handle students far more radical than he is. Available on DVD and Bluray.
10. ‘Getting Straight’ (1970)
In this comedy-drama from Richard Rush, Elliott Gould is a former radical who returns to college to get his degree and falls in with a younger group of student radicals calling for a strike and revolution. Who knew Harrison Ford and Candace Bergen were ever this young?