April
2002%20-%20sm.JPG)
Now
Playing At The Adelphia-Astoria
Hair
- With Treat Williams, John Savage, Beverly D'Angelo
Directed by Milos Forman
By Issy Chaplin
Hair
is Milos Forman's 1979 film adaptation of the Broadway musical
that came to symbolize what some imagined to be the celebration
of the 1960s. But the film is a truer depiction of that era than
most moviegoers anticipate. While certainly it is a celebration
of sorts - Forman's addition of a plot, mixed with the choreography
of Twyla Tharp, fine performances by then-newcomers Treat Williams,
John Savage, Beverly D'Angelo, and Tom Hulce, and elegant cinematography
of New York City locations by Miroslav Ondricek - is an athletic,
sweet portrayal of the love generation. Its treatment of Vietnam
seems almost naïve, until the last ten minutes of the film,
at which point Forman collapses the very latticework of energy,
music and light he had constructed for his audience, leaving them
instead with the stark, heartbreaking expanse of a national cemetery.
Hugely underrated, Hair was released within the same year
that brought to theaters Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse
Now and Michael Cimino's brutal The Deer Hunter, and
years before Oliver Stone's Platoon examined the war as
a war instead of a social issue. Still, it remains the saddest
of the Vietnam films, giving lie to the notion that the Sixties
were a time of untouchable innocence.
In Forman's version, Hair follows a young Oklahoman (Savage)
as he arrives in New York City for his induction into the Army.
On the street he meets a band of hippies led by Williams, and
follows them through a loose series of adventures and misadventures
that serve as a framework for the music and dance that bring the
film so vividly to life. Tharp's choreography, sometimes manic,
sometimes as graceful as ballet, is touched by slight imperfections
that allow each sequence to lose the air of ersatz slickness that
so often weighs down Hollywood musicals. Though produced on the
edge of the Eighties, Hair captures the flavor of the Psychedelic
Era better than any film made during the Sixties themselves.
To Adam Jeffers, proprietor of the Adelphia-Astoria movie house,
recently renovated at the corner of West Lafayette and Front Streets,
Hair is one of the saddest films ever made. He intends
to present it at least once each year, he says, because he thinks
it deserves a regular big-screen viewing in at least one city
in America. When the film premiered in 1979, Jeffers had no desire
to watch what he thought would be a "draft-dodger party."
Ten years back from Vietnam at that point, he remembered reading
about the play while serving with the First Air Cavalry and not
understanding for the life of him why so many people would be
so attracted to such a meaningless expense of time, talent and
money. By the time he saw the film sometime around 1990, it was
on a videocassette his daughter Miranda had rented to watch with
her friends. Adam looked into the room toward the beginning of
the film, and as he watched Tharp's dancers skip in complex footwork
along the moors of Central Park, became entranced. "Every
once in a while, you come across a piece of art that blends into
something that's nearly perfect," Jeffers says. "I don't
think it's all about the director, the script, the cast. There's
a little bit of luck involved, a little bit of alchemy, and it
just all comes together. When you find something like that, you
want everyone to see it. When it presents such truth, you want
everyone to see it even more. That's how I feel about Hair."
If other veterans disagree with him about Hair's portrayal
of the tragedy of Vietnam, Jeffers thinks that's because the film's
turning point appears so late, and is so subtle. "What I
take away from that film is that Vietnam hurt," Jeffers says.
"It hurt if you were a soldier, it hurt if you were a parent,
it hurt if you were an American. I'm not saying it hurt because
it was a bad war - there's no other kind of war - I'm saying it
hurt because we weren't all together, and it took nearly twenty
years for this country to figure out that whatever was right or
whatever was wrong, all of us who went over there were just doing
what we thought was our duty. If anyone failed, it was our leadership.
The soldiers and sailors, the pilots and medics - we just went
over because our leaders said they needed us to."
A few people have suggested to Jeffers that films like Hair
are better presented in venues such as the Trenton Public Library,
which has a regular film series. Does he expect to fill seats
during Hair's annual run?
"Maybe not at first," he says. "But maybe more
people will come as the years go by and they hear they'll have
a chance to see a true gem of the American cinema."
If they don't come to see Hair at the Adelphia-Astoria,
Jeffers says many video stores have a copy for rent. "It's
better on a big screen," he says. "But even if you can't
see it in a theatre, you should make sure that you see it."
###
Issy
Chaplin is a Trenton native, now working at the Division of Taxation.
