The Strawberry Statement (1970)

The Strawberry Statement is a well-intentioned mess of a movie. As drama, it's pretty hopeless, featuring a trite screenplay rife with stereotypes posing as characters and a plot that casts motivation and reality to the wind in favor of "big" moments that are supposed to be full of meaning but ring totally hollow. Stuart Hagmann's direction is haphazard, rarely intent on anything more than getting from one sequence to the next, and not always succeeding terribly well at that. Yet there is a strange appeal about Strawberry, largely because it does do a decent job of capturing part of what made the 1960s such a strange and fascinating decade. While its heart is certainly with the student "radicals," it does manage to convey the fact that the reasons some of these youths were involved in the "movement" had less to do with political convictions than with wanting to belong to the new thing or wanting to get laid. Strawberry also boasts a great soundtrack, mostly by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and a compelling and -- given the material with which he had to work -- surprisingly complex performance from Bruce Davison. This helps matters tremendously, but ultimately Strawberry is more interesting as a cultural artifact than as a film. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide