MEDICINE BALL CARAVAN

a Fred Weintraub Family Production

Produced by Francois Reichenbach and Tom Donahue

Directed by Francois Reichenbach

If it’s debatable that rock ’n’ roll has fallen on evil days, nobody but the most masochistic charisma-hound could deny that rock ’n’ roll movies have degenerated to the point that they can only get better or repeat themselves in their present nadirs until nobody attends at all. It’s too saddening to even mention things like Woodstock and Let It Be in the same breath with real r&r movies like Rock Around the Clock or High School Confidential or even a Joey Dee & the Starliters quickie from the height of the Twist phase; but if you dozed through Woodstock and walked out on the Beatles film and the Mad Dogs mess, as I did, then you have absolutely got to see Medicine Ball Caravan, the celluloid log of a trip across the States undertaken last year by a battalion of 154 San Francisco hippies in a train of Keseybuses, the whole thing financed and duly recorded by Warner Brothers.

The reason you have got to see it is that if the musical innocuousness and crass conceptions of those movies insulted you right out of the theatre, this one will have you storming the projection booth and taking a torch to the film.

Picture a screenfull of cute bluegreen tiedyes. Across the bottom rolls a cute caricature of the caravan, and over that: “Warner Brothers A Kinney Leisure Service JPresents ...” the San Francisco Skyline. The Golden Gate Bridge. If they had any sense of humor they’d have cut to a picture of the streetsigns intersection Haight/Ashbury, but they don’t so we get Tom Donahue’s voice over the travelogue shots and then cut the man himself in his deejay chair rapping about how him and a whole slew o’ mellow friends ’n’ nabes are gonna go out in buses holding concerts at random picturesque spots along the way, “so you can see there’s gonna be a lotta boogiein’ ...”

Which might be unintentionally funny enough itself were it not for the facts that this movie is just one bad joke after another and what it says about itself in every frame is not funny at all. And the ineluctable truth that boredom is never any laughs either. It’s bad enough to have to have to watch long shots of Milan Melvin and his motorcycle crossing the plains, but that’s just the beginning of the boogiein’ in terms both of cliches trotted out of the Consciousness III arsenal and the groovy raveup flipside which relegates non Con III folks to the status of pointedly unattractive units.

Meaning that this is the movie of the year if our idea of revealing social cinema verite or of the meaning of rock ’n’ roll is vignettes of busloads of freaks giving the peace symbol to Uptite Straights, in station wagons who clench jaws and speed on. Or a bit with two people making ultrahistrionic love at dawn under an American flag while the National Anthem plays, which would be plain embarrassing in its incredible staginess if you weren’t so irritated by almost everything you’d seen by that time that you’d like to accelerate your own self and drive right through the screen.

The resolute folksiness of the whole thing manages to sustain the cloying tone established when the camera first approaches a stoned-out caravaneer asking, Why are you op this trip?, and elicits the first “It’s ... I’m .. . uhhr . . . oh wow, man, I just can’t put it into words” Two or three more bits like that and you know you’re in a Boone’s Farm Commercial; only diff being that it’s upwards of 90 minutes long and you’ve paid the price of two bottles of the stuff to see it and even listen to such 1967 narcoganda as “The only conflicts we had on the trip resulted from people using alcohol...”

Reality does intrude just once: a gnarly old character in a Stetson and handlebar mustache is sitting by a hippie and saying: “Yeh, I’m the last o’ the cowboys, and if was jest a little younger I’d pick up an’ go right along with ya. The cowboys were rebels too.” As usual in these movies, the odd older Con I or II person encountered along the way steals the show by having at least twice as much personality as any of the smug mugging longhairs, as director Francois Reichenbach proves straightaway by barging in on the old cowpoke’s fascinating discursion and drooling, “You are the most beautiful man I have ever met.” The geezer cocks one weather-wise eye on him and sez: “What’re you gettin’ some local color here?”

The tonal colors are not local, of course, nor are many of them people of “color” at all. The wretched Mad Dogs & Cocaine contingent Stoneground get their screeching pusses onscreen a lot, which is only fitting since both trip and film were at least partially conceived as launching pads for them; Alice Cooper and B.B. King turn in equally perfunctory performances; Doug Kershaw freaks out magnificently with Stoneground rumbling and bumbling underneath, for the sole moments of musical interest in the entire film; and lots of the travelog footage is overlain by cutesy stuff like “Hippie From Olema” by the Youngbloods.

The whole shebang ends up at Antioch college, where a group of students in cahoots with continuing caravanpirate David Peel challenge the troupe’s presence at their school and the point of the entire trip and film. The students are made out to be Fanatic Radical spoilsports; if the “We have come for your daughters” on the front of Donahue’s bus and the film’s flackery wasn’t evidence enough of the enterprise’s level of consciousness, a shot of two women students accusing the caravan people of chauvinism pans down to show them holding hands. As earlier when B.B. King was playing and they printed his name at the bottom of the screen, just to make sure that everybody Gets The Point.

And, one way or another, they should. David Peel almost got it when a caravaneer, outraged by his admittedly rather confused (“I’m a Jew and you’re Hitler for Warner Brothers!”) diatribes, pulled a knife on him. And I got it when, in another moment of uncustomary candor like the one with the old cowboy, a caravan member explains to the Antioch students: “We’re making a movie to show to longhairs.”

That’s all, folks.

Lester Bangs

OMEGA MAN

Charlton Heston just doesn’t make anything but religious movies. Moving from Moses to Planet of the Apes to Omega Man, he hasn’t lost a shred of that old time touch: the celluloidmythic hero vibrating within the popreligious epic.

Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet: It’s operational meaning is the Last Tragic Hero, the last apotheosis of western rationalist-individualism, the heir of the rugged stone technolgist, dangerously diluted through the centuries to the tools’ forgotten mask, to the Omega-Messiah. His only meaningful action is self-sacrifice. This time Charlton has danced his way into Jesus Christ Supersavior, second time around.

Omega Man is just supposed to be an exciting adventure movie with weird special effects and middle of the road all the way.

It isn’t exciting. There’s a bike chase sequence but it’s third rate and doesn’t make any sense. The special effects and makeup are of sub-television quality.

But the movie is just exactly middleof-the-road and in terms of the myth where middle-of-the-road is these days is interesting enough. There’s precise racial balance; that is, perfect tokenism: the Hero and Villian are white, the Heroine and the Villian’s Right Hand Man are black. It’s a GP rated movie with a sex situation — but you see much more of Heston’s chest than you do of hers. She’s nude for about twenty seconds in the bedroom and you get the feeling they cast a black woman because she doesn’t show up well in the dark. But the real interest here is the story and the nuanaces of the script and visual treatment that make up a middle of the road myth of Genesis II:

Heston is a military doctor caught wheeling around an empty city on his way to the longest running movie in town (he’s running it and it just happens to be Woodstock). The world has ended a few years before (by the way) when a Russian-Chinese war (note:Americans are not responsible) unleashed germs that killed or perverted everybody. Except our hero, who had unknowingly developed an effective vaccine and shot up just in time.

He’s seen Woodstock enough to know all the lines and the Woodstock dream is set up as the ruefully lost paradise — only to later cast its shadow as the ideal future.

Meanwhile our hero (who is either a very dull character or Heston’s acting is worse than usual) is trying to keep him self sane with all the tools — electronic security devices, automatic weapons, automatic can openers — that the city provides him. Since machines don’t die from germs there’s quite a bit of hardware left.

He is fanatically hunted by a band of ghouls called the Family who have been physically maimed (and driven a little nuts) by the killer germs but live on — their skin and hair turned albino, their eyes over-sensitized, they can’t stand the light of day. The Family is led by a former news commentator whose warped charisma urges them to destroy all machines because it was technology that destroyed the world.

Neither the Family nor our Rugged Individualist know there are other survivors, until the black woman shows up, says some militant stuff to Heston like “move your ass,” then reveals where her heart truly lies by taking him out to the sunny countryside where the other survivors live. They are all young, mostly children, untouched by the disease on the surface. But every so often one of them changes into an albino freak in the middle of the night.

So we have the Man, strong, not too interesting, but resourceful and useful as hell. . . We have the warped anti-technologist goblins, strictly Charles Manson and the Weather organization, living in the darkness of the city — and conjuring all the sci-fi/occult visions of people of the darkness — the night, the deep forest creatures, the underground . . . and the wholesome, frightened children of the country, who live together, black and white, who use technology but avoid the wasted caverns of the dead city.

A lot of heavy, deeply emotional images are tossed around here, like the fear of televised charisma as the edge of witchcraft, or the dual nature of darkness as both primeval and linked to man’s violation of the earth for his industry, the paradoxical products of the machine age — ploughshares and swords, guns and medicine, not to mention the recently resurfacing fear, ' the monsterization of children, from nice kids into sadistic ghouls.

It’s doubtful whether these are conscious themes, which is just as well. They probably wouldn’t have meant as much if they were conscious. The end of this new beginning is the death of Moses, Ben-Hur, Hippocrates, Newton Ford, Dulles — and Charlton Heston — in a fountain, his arm floating in a limp pose of crucifixion, the American flag visible and a spear at his side. While the progenitors of the Woodstock Paradise drive back to the country, armed with gangling good will and a bottle of Heston’s blood to protect them from the sickness they may still have in them. He died, you might say, as Doctor Christ rather than General Motors.

It won’t be long before Omega Man is recognized as an ass-backwards classic of the early seventies (like Sunset Boulevard from the early forties) because it orchestrates all the right images into a bumbling, but altogether real vision of the apocalypse of this moment.

William Kowinski