Action at Generation Gap

by Dan Wakefield

Hollywood has finally found a new genre to replace the Western, and is making the most (if not the best) of it. The nice thing about the Western is that you have this built-in conflict, right? It’s the Cowboys versus the Indians, or, more basically, the Good Guys against the Bad Guys. You can tell the good from the bad just by looking at them, which makes for nice, relaxing entertainment, no strain on the brain. The only drawback with the Western in today’s market is that it’s so old and familiar; and besides, Dodge City is not where it’s happening, baby, nor is Death Valley where it’s at in the current pop topography. The contemporary emotional equivalent of Custer surrounded by Sioux at Little Big Horn is Grayson Kirk besieged by the SDS in his office in Low Library; not Cowboys versus Indians but the Young against the Old is now the most fashionable version of the Good Guys against the Bad Guys. You see the possibilities there? A whole new kind of movie formula, more with-it than the Westerns — the “Younguns” !

Chubasco directed by Alan Miner (Warner Brothers—7 Arts)

How Sweet It Is directed by Jerry Paris (National General)

Skidoo directed by Otto Preminger (Paramount)

The first significant Youngun was The Graduate, which showed how effectively — and lucratively — the old Cowboy-Indian emotion could be translated into the conflict between the Young (Good) Guys and the Old (Bad) Guys. All the Old Guys in The Graduate are conniving and treacherous, shallow and ruthless, beholden to graven images and heathen idols such as Money, Lust, Success, and Swimming Pools. On the other hand, the Young Guys, though at first confused and troubled by the evil ways of the Bad Guys who run things, are sensitive, decent, and brave, and eventually end up on the side of Truth, Love, and Personal Faith and Fulfillment. Of course there are some of the young who have been brainwashed by the enemy elders and who sold out to them (remember the Indian traitors who acted as scouts for the white men?), like the pipe-smoking, cliché-spewing fraternity fellow who tries to marry the beautiful heroine but in the end is outwitted and outfought. Just after the pagan wedding rite is performed, the young hero rushes in and carries off the bride in a scene as dramatic and emotionally crowdpleasing as any last-minute cavalry charge (instead of the bugles, you hear the guitars in the background when the Good Guys are coming to the rescue).

The trappings and surface aspects of the Youngun can be grafted onto almost any sort of plot in an effort to jazz it up, and there is a sense that this was what happened with Chubasco, which is essentially a movie about the romance of tuna fishing (the sort of thing in which the music swells when the tuna are sighted). Had this movie been made in the pre-Graduate era of a few years ago, it would probably have stuck to the main plot, which involves a mixed-up kid in trouble who is paroled to the captain of a tuna boat and given a chance to prove himself in a tough, clean, healthy outdoor occupation. This is still the basic story, but it has been given the Youngun treatment by making the kid a hippie who has been busted for pot and is in love with a girl whose father is a tough tuna captain and forbids his daughter to hang out with dirty hippies. The movie has a classic Youngun opening, as exciting and true to its own form as those Westerns that opened with a flaming arrow piercing a covered wagon and the wagon-train leader and Indian chief swearing vengeance on one another. Chubasco begins with the hippie and his girlfriend’s father attempting to strangle one another in the police station where the hippie has just been booked on his pot charge. Father yanks daughter off for home, but hippie vows to murder the old man if he lays a hand on her. So there you have the Youngun thing going right away — the possibility of patricide! Later for the popcorn, eh gang? The bloodshed and feuding potential of the Generation Gap is greater than any you could find in a simple, old-fashioned ambush of pioneers at the Cumberland Gap.

Chubasco has a happy Youngun ending, with hippie getting girl and father and son-in-law manfully reconciled — unlikely but reassuring, like the Westerns that end with the Indian war chief signing a treaty with the gruff captain from over at Fort Stockade. The hippie in this one is played with appropriate troubled sensitivity by Chris Jones, who starred as the first hippie President in Wild in the Streets, which is rumored to be really a documentary made from a nightmare dreamed by Hubert Humphrey.

How Sweet It Is is a fluff of a comedy based on a book called The Girl in the Turquoise Bikini, and I suspect that before the Youngun era it would have stuck to the book title and basic story — a wholesome, pretty, middle-class American housewife who gets mixed up (innocently of course) with one of those suave movie Frenchmen but is able to convince her jealous, loving husband that she was true-blue all the time, and they are reconciled and live happily and comically ever after. How to bring that particular chestnut up to date? Well, how about giving them a teen-age son who wears long hair and a peace symbol and has a girlfriend named Boots (so named “because she always wears boots,” a tried and true kick, as proved conclusively by Nancy Sinatra), and eventually all is resolved both among and between the generations. The depressing thing about this one for the over-thirty crowd is that middle-aged, cute little Mom is played by Debbie Reynolds, our own former teen-age swinger! So we beat on . . .

These last two flicks have some of the standard elements of the Youngun, but they are not the real thing — like Westerns that are really about cattle ranching or horse breeding or railroad construction but throw in an Indian raid or cavalry charge just to liven things up. Perhaps the first pure Youngun, one that contains every conceivable element of the genre, is Skidoo, which is evidently Otto Preminger’s bid to gain amnesty when all the overthirties are put in concentration camps, à la Wild in the Streets.

Those who dig Younguns should love Skidoo, and indeed the audience laughed and cheered in all the right places when I saw it at a screening at Paramount at the invitation of Mr. Preminger, who was appropriately clad for the occasion in one of his Nehru suits. It must be noted, however, that the audience was stacked, consisting almost entirely of young people and their fellow travelers; there were probably more men with beads than at any event since Vatican II. Like Westernlovers grooving on scalping scenes and shoot-outs and rustlers crashing the old corral, this audience was digging the Youngun equivalents: acid trips, nude body paintings, pot smoking, anti-Establishment jokes, cop-baiting, lots of capital-letter LOVE Talk — the works, man.

In the press, all those Youngun numbers represent evil, and their practitioners are automatically the Bad Guys, but in movies this simpleminded view has most often been reversed, and the hippies are automatically the Good Guys. Preminger’s rendition of this is supposed to be farce, but it is “message farce,” and the problem is that the message is a farce too. The daily press message for us on the subject is that if all the “punks and thugs,” as the New York Daily News calls them, were just given a good spanking and an eight-hour job and a shave and haircut and a copy of the collected speeches of William Jennings Bryan, all would be well with the world. The message of Skidoo is that if only the corrupt elders would listen to the wisdom of the flower children, if they would turn on to acid and pot and paint their sagging bodies in Day-Glo colors, all would be well with the world.

Skidoo is a reversal of the old movie comedy concept of the Andy Hardy days, when the wise elders helped and counseled and extended understanding to the misguided kids. Now it is the kids who turn on the old folks and lead them guru-like to Truth and Beauty. Jackie Gleason is a reformed gangster who is called back by the mob to knock off an old pal in the pen, is guided on an acid trip by a young hippie, and Sees the Light, and — that’s right — he can’t kill anyone, no sir, and his young guru delightedly pronounces that Jackie has succeeded in “losing his ego” and is saved. Eventually the entire prison is turned on, even the poor dumb cops and this phony U.S. senator who is visiting the place, see, and all the other corrupt elders, and so really there is hope for them after all — oh, yes, and all acid trips are evidently a real groove, a regular happiness explosion. Sure, Jackie Gleason has a couple of brief, scary hallucinations, but they were kind of fun, too, and mainly the whole thing was a gas.

Groucho Marx, as the head of the underworld mob, is also saved by the young hippie guru, who turns him on to pot; the two of them are seen at the end benignly sailing off into the distance on a freaky little sailboat with Love and Peace painted on the sails and Groucho in Indian robes (not redskin Indian, but Nehru Indian), and he is gripping his roach holder and sucking in on the grass instead of that dirty old cigar he was hung up on all these years! Carol Channing as Gleason’s wife discovers her daughter with a bunch of hippies who have just given her a nude-bodypainting, and Mom is so taken with the kids that she invites the whole tribe of them over to stay at her house, and it’s one big happy hippie communal family (as we learned long ago, all hippie families are alike).

For those who can’t just get their kicks by watching other people turn on in a film, Skidoo offers plenty of good old-fashioned titillation passing as the latest thing in fun and games: in the course of it all we get to see Alexandra Hay, the latest thing in beautiful blond teeny-boppers, undress in order to have her body painted, get fondled and unbuttoned by Groucho, and caught in a shower with Frankie Avalon; for those who still have a thing about older women (over eighteen) there is Carol Channing stripping down to her bra and panties and yellow vinyl boots; the black model, Luna, in a gown that is almost entirely backless even at the bottom, gets out of that and into bed with Alexandra Hay’s hippie boyfriend; there is something for everyone. Mr. Preminger is really in there swinging, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he next produced the Timothy Leary Story, a sort of inspirational film along the lines of The Cardinal.

So don’t worry if the Italians seem to have taken the lead in producing Westerns. Hollywood is pioneering with Younguns, and it looks like the trip has just begun.

The Writers

T. S. Matthews, an American journalist living in England, is a former managing editor of Time.

Victor Lange is chairman of the German Department at Princeton University.

Joseph Epstein is Senior Editor of Encyclopedia Britannica.

Edward Weeks is the author of a new book, Fresh Waters.

Carter Harman, a free-lance writer and reviewer, is the author of A Popular History of Music.

Martha Bacon’s children’s book Sophia Scrooby Preserved has just been published by AtlanticLittle, Brown.

Phoebe Adams and Herbert Kupferberg contribute regularly to the Atlantic.