The Cavalier daily :: Friday, October 2, 1970 :: University of Virginia Library

Elliott Gould's third film arrived
in town yesterday, and Gould has
arrived in another sense as well. The
"wunderkind" of Time Magazine
has achieved a star status not unlike
that of his wife, Barbra Streisand,
and others like Peter Sellers and
Julie Andrews. He's had two good
roles in "Bob and Carol and Ted
and Alice" and "M*A*S*H," but
with "Getting Straight," Gould
leans close to the danger zone.

Being a popular star, everyone
will rush to see the current movie
of the star, hoping to see a great
film. The star is used to add to the
box-office appeal of a few bad
films, and the public is reduced to
the faithful who'll go see anything
if so-and-so's in it. We all real
this, but does Elliott Gould?

It's no fault of Gould's that his
character has quite a few gaps in his
personality, or that the story isn't
well written. Robert Kaufman is
responsible for the script, but
surely his material is helped
considerably by the talents of
Gould and Candice Bergen. Their
acting is very good and they play
off each other effectively, until
Gould starts overacting, which ruins
some scenes.

The character of Harry Bailey is
similar to "Ted" and the
"M*A*S*H" surgeon. No wonder
Time considers these three roles to
have made Gould a candidate for
"the archetype of the urban man
struggling to stay afloat in a
swelling sea of neuroses." (Sounds
like Time, doesn't it?) Funny thing,
but Gould hasn't really had a
chance to show off his talents yet.
He should have won an Oscar for
his supporting work in "Bob and
Carol." "M*A*S*H" was a
fantastic film, but wasn't its success
due to the whole east and Robert
Altman, the director?

For clarification: Elliott Gould
is terrific. He is a very talented
actor. He is not used to his best
advantage in "Getting Straight,"
but neither is Candice Bergen, and
this is the best acting she has done
to date. They both have bad
material to work with.

The problems of
characterization are not unique to
the leading stars. All the rest of the
characters in the film are stock
characters the militant, the white
upper class activist, the ignorant
jock, the loud-mouth girl radical,
the spaced-out draft dodger, and
the evil, mean, old, nasty-nasty
dean. This campus is perhaps the
only place in America with total
solidarity, namely all the students
are for the strike and the entire
faculty is against it. Gould is
balanced somewhere in between
these extremes.

If everything is so nice and easy
to understand in "Getting
Straight," why are Gould and
Bergen so messed up? They are the
only humans in director Richard
Rush's fantasy of a student strike.
Everything in the film is just too
well planned and used blatantly.
The campus looks like a factory,
the names of the buildings sound
highly technical, and the camera
focuses on a background action at
just the right split second to show
an obvious irony.

For the film to succeed, it
should have less emphasis on visual
style. The constant use of focusing
within a shot is tedious and
distracting. Overhead shots of the
riot are nice; they show how well
the scene was mapped out to look
authentic. So authentic you might
be fooled into believing what you
see on the screen.

Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen in "Getting Straight"

The important word of the year
is "relevant" It appears everywhere,
including Hollywood where the
studios are trying to pump new
blood into a dying business, by
attracting the youth audience. So
being relevant, the viewing public
can expect to see more milk-fed
versions of campus life. MGM has
already released "Strawberry
Statement" and there's a new
movie starring Anthony Quinn as a
student-appointed president and
Ann-Margaret as his coed mistress.
With such relevance we should turn
on the tube

(Now at the University)