HAIR Directed by Milos Forman; Screenplay by Michael Weller
The film version of Hair is proof that real miracles can happen in show business. If ever a project looked doomed, it was this one. Hair's source, the 1968 Broadway hit, was a largely plotless, if tuneful, show that homogenized the '60s for theater audiences; even at the time, it was dated. The movie's creators —Czech-born Director Milos Forman, Playwright Michael Weller, Choreographer Twyla Tharp—have never previously negotiated the perilous tides of movie musicals. Add a largely unproven cast and a grand budget, and you can see just how hairy an undertaking this movie was. One false move, and Hair would have congealed into Grease.
There are no false moves. Hair succeeds at all levels—as lowdown fun, as affecting drama, as exhilarating spectacle and as provocative social observation. It achieves its goals by rigorously obeying the rules of classic American musical comedy: dialogue, plot, song and dance blend seamlessly to create a juggernaut of excitement. Though every cut and camera angle in Hair appears to have been carefully conceived, the total effect is spontaneous. Like the best movie musicals of the '50s (Singin' in the Rain) and the '60s (A Hard Day's Night), Hair leaps from one number to the next. Soon the audience is leaping too.
Scenarist Weller is best known for Moonchildren, his fine, reflective play about lost renegades of the '60s. He has written Hair as a witty cross between A Midsummer Night's Dream and the 1949 MGM musical On the Town. The story begins as Claude (John Savage, of The Deer Hunter), an Oklahoma farm boy, arrives in Manhattan for a final day of liberty before induction into the Army. Like the World War II sailors of On the Town, Claude plans to take in the tourist sights, but he is quickly seduced by more hedonistic pleasures. Falling in with a tribe of long-haired dropouts, he soon discovers countercultural drugs and politics. Thanks to a whimsically funny plot twist, he also falls in love with Sheila (the voluptuous but innocent Beverly D'Angelo), a debutante he gallantly rescues from the upper-crust sobriety of Short Hills, N.J.
If portrayed literally, Claude's odyssey to self-awareness would be as hokey as Hollywood's "trip" movies of the '60s, like Easy Rider. Instead, Hair presents the decade in the terms of balletic myth. The passions of a generation are poured into a single setting, Central Park, on a single enchanted night. The park becomes an idealized, but never sentimentalized, recreation of the brief-lived Utopias that once sprang up in Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and the East Village. Yet Weller does not get carried away by his conceit. His characters talk like people, not platitudinous flower children, and their all too innocent dream does not last forever. Eventually the tribe must leave its forest idyl behind to confront the wintry realities of a society gripped by an irrational war.