The theme (Arthur Magazine‘s theme) at the Silent Movie Theatre on Tuesday was pretty precise: “93-Minute Films Involving Euphoriants.” Indeed they were and indeed they did.
Work Is a 4-Letter Word (Peter Hall, 1968, 35mm, 93 min.) is about a utopian society (industrial complex, acronym DICE) that turns out to be not so perfect after all (surprise! …This film is a good example of “pop” culture being a few years behind literary culture) and a guy who’s really into growing mushrooms (“really” as in obsessively) and likely has myriad other psychological problems. The movie started out stronger than expected (the highlight being when a priest literally throws our protagonist out of church and he responds, “I’m going to tell God on you”) and ends almost exactly where expected (with that fun everybody-is-high-and-acting-crazy scene so prevalent in late ’60s/early ’70s films, or at least, apparently, the ones I’m inclined to see).
Taking Off (Milos Forman, 1971, 35mm, 93 min.) is in some ways hard to explain. There’s the main plot about a teenage runaway and her parents who, in the course of searching for her meet other parents on the same journey (there’s another acronym here, but I forget), which, oddly, leads to a scene in which this guy explains in precise detail how to smoke pot. But then there’s a subplot, that never actually turns into a plot, about teenagers trying out for some kind of singing something or other. This sequence, interspersed with the actual story, forms the soundtrack of the film. There’s a nightclub performance by the Ike & Tina Turner Revue (actually part of the main plot), a young Carly Simon singing “Long Term Physical Effects,” a young Kathy Bates singing “Even the Horses Had Wings,” and many others. I’m curious which of the two ideas came first—the music or the story.