Hair

Treat Williams died in 2023, and when TCM had its night in December honoring people who died, they selected him by showing the 1979 movie version of the musical Hair. Not having seen the movie (or, unsurprisingly since I don't do stage musicals for the most part), I decided to record the TCM showing in order to be able to do a post on it here. I've finally gotten around to watching it, so now it's time for the post.

It's the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its height in America. Rural Oklahoma kid Claude Bukowski (John Savage) gets his draft notice, but for some weird reason this requires him to go all the way to New York City. I'd think the draft board would send him to a closer military base; apparently this is a change from the stage musical in which Claude was a New York hippie. So Claude heads off to New York, and seems as full of pride and willingness to serve as the steel-town workers from The Deer Hunter.

But in New York he gets waylaid by a group of hippies led by Berger (that's Treat Williams). They're basically being a bunch of dicks, trying to con people into giving them some money, and even devolving into behaviors that are rather more illegal (which escalates as the movie goes on). In this first encounter, they interfere with a rich girl from New Jersey, Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), who's trying to rent one of thos Central Park horses. Claude saves her, and is smitten by her despite the fact that he's never going to see her again.

Or so he thinks. Since Sheila is a debutante type, the society pages mention one of the coming-out type dinners she'll be at, and the hippies arrange to crash the dinner, bringing Claude along. And Sheila kinda-sorta likes the idea of the bad boy. Not that Claude is a bad boy at heart, but the idea of the hippies violating all sorts of norms to get Claude to see Sheila again. And despite her supposed to be engaged to someone from her own class, Sheila is smitten with Claude, too.

Sheila's parents don't like any of this, so they understandably have the hippies arrested. Claude is so dumb that he uses up what little money he has left to bail out his "friends", who are inveterate moochers. To make matters worse, Berger and his merry band of hippies start carjacking Sheila and her boyfriend to get more money and access to a car.

Eventually, Claude does do his required enlistment, Berger is none to pleased about this, and decides to go out to the base where Claude has been stationed to try to get him to reconsider. Eventually, they even steal a car and commit much bigger crimes just to give Claude one more shot to see Sheila before going off to Vietnam. But there's a twist in all this....

The big problem I had with this version of Hair -- and again, I don't know how much the original Broadway musical has this problem, not having seen it -- is that the hippies are really selfish people here, not caring whom they inconvenience in order to get what they want. I mean, we're supposed to have sympathy for them despite the fact that they have no qualms about blocking drivers from going where they want and committing bigger carjackings, theft, and kidnappings. Regardless of your views on the Vietnam War, they're severely mean even to squares who did want to volunteer, and do it just so they can get their own way.

The musical version is also well known for having a nude scene in a draft board number. The movie, of course, couldn't go quite that far, and had to resort to "artistic nudity" in that scene. The actors are naked, but the camera work and placement of hands doesn't actually show the genitalia.

Still, I'm sure there are going to be people who enjoy this adaptation of Hair, even if I didn't.