"Psych-Out!" starring Jack Nicholson & Susan Strasberg,1968.

[Ed Augusts]

Watched an old tape of "Psych-Out!" that I'd salted away many years
ago. Yum! The Haight Ashbury was there, big and bold as a
psychedelic "Print Mint" poster, every bit as good as a 1968 film of
it could do it justice, as comical and colorful as a pile of Robert
Crumb "Zap!" comix, and as young and 'hip' as Nicholson, Bruce Dern,
and other nifty characters could be, sporting beads, long hair, and
speaking the way hippies spoke and still speak today. "Cool, man!
Wow! Far out!"

This film very nearly does bring the Haight back to life, watching it
40 years after the fact... Just seeing Jack Nicholson 40 years
younger than his current, cynical and morbid edge-of-the-wheel-chair
roles was a tremendous experience, just like seeing Marlon Brando in
his mid-1950's roles again, instead of as his lagubrious, puffy-faced
image portrayed him in a number of latter-day roles... from
"Apocalypse Now", onward.

From the moment the "Strawberry Alarm Clock" and "Seeds" soundtrack
started rolling, and Strasberg, a deaf girl running away from an
abusive family, rolls past what could only be Golden Gate Park and on
into a sea of slightly run-down Victorian buildings, we know long
before the iconic "Haight-Ashbury" street sign appears, that we are in
San Francisco, and that this is Year Two, YEAR ONE being the "Summer
of Love" that occurred the previous year, 1967.

(Oh, I was there that very summer, 1967. I wouldn't have been
anywhere else, It was an amazing era in an amazing, tolerant, 'air
conditioned' city. "Baghdad By the Bay", Herb Caen called it, when
Baghdad was just an exotic Middle Eastern melting-pot... And San
Francisco was never such a melting-pot as it was when 100,000 hippies
descended on it during the Summer of Love. (So many love affairs IN
San Francisco and FOR San Francisco started at that time!) Surely
that is the 'scene' which Hollywood portrayed, one year later, when
this flick was made. It was a great time! The time I personally had
in the City in 1967 made me return, after I married, four years later.
The hippies were pretty much gone, and I wasn't a hippie anymore
either. But the city and its attractions had gotten under my skin.)

We see the Haight initially through Susan Strasberg's eyes. She loves
what she sees, she wants to believe in it, she is entranced and
enchanted to the point where her quest for her missing brother is, for
a while, a nonessential sub-plot...First she wants to be with Jack
Nicholson, aptly nicknamed "Stony" Wow! Is he young and full of
pep! He plays a rock band guitarist who, up till now, has only done
"one night stands" with the girls, in a private little corner of his
crowded 'pad'.... Nicholson, who had a hand in writing the script,
cuts himself a much better role here than he had in "Easy Rider",
filmed the following year, 1969, in which he got no better than 3rd
billing behind Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. (Actually, the non-stop
runs of amazing MUSIC had the top billing in THAT movie!)

This was Hollywood's attempt to depict as nearly as it could without
being ridiculously garish, and without preaching against the vast
cultural 'wave' of pot and LSD-taking teenyboppers and young
independence-hungry 'twenties kids that was going on at the time.
"The Trip", another Hollywood venture, starring Peter Fonda made about
the same time, tried and failed to portray the hippies and the
recreational drug scene, since it was clearly an attempt to show the
very WORST of the "Flower Power" generation. "The Trip" appears on
DVD's alongside a heavily edited version of "Psych-Out!" Even so,
"Psych-Out!" is clearly the better picture.

"Psych-Out!" is a film in which a bunch of punks, all of them
"squares" representing Middle America, are out to get "The Seeker",
Susan Strasberg's brother. They are ready to kill him, if need be...
Why? Because, as one of the punks explains, the Seeker says: "Make
love, not war!" It is the prejudices and uptightness of an America
that felt threatened by "Love-In's" and ecstatic mental states which
comes in for more ridicule than any of the Hippies.

This doesn't mean there aren't some scenes which portray the 'down-
side' of hippie life, such as an art gallery scene in which a guy on a
'bad trip, ' who says he can usually snap out of a bad trip by
snapping his fingers, this time finds that he snaps and snaps and
snaps and it just doesn't work... He's super-uptight because he's
started seeing things, Nicholson and his other pals look (to him) like
zombies out of "Return of the Living Dead". He nearly cuts his hand
off with a portable power saw before his pals subdue him.

Was delighted that I was seeing the complete version, not the badly-
mangled DVD, also containing Peter Fonda's "The Trip" that was put-
out some years ago, which many reviewers have blasted as a terrible,
incomplete, duo because of the many cuts to "Psych-Out!" which were
inanely, insanely, made!

Somebody gave this film a bad review, saying it had been filmed in
Culver City (which is between Hollywood and the L.A. airport), NOT
San Francisco... but they must not have seen this movie, because the
scene of Nicholson and Strasberg climbing up and over a rooftop was
clearly filmed amid San Francisco landscapes. In another scene, the
towers of University of San Francisco, just outside the Haight, can be
seen in the distance. All the street scenes shown are absolutely
genuine Haight-Ashbury streets that parallel or cross that district.
Maybe some interiors were shot in Culver City---so what? The only
possible scene that doesn't ring true is the wrecking yard scene with
hundreds of dead cars piled up on each other, that scene is a place
which is nowhere within the city limits of the City & County of S.F.
that I can think of. Junkyards? Piles of derelict cars? I have to
agree---those could well have been filmed in Southern California!

Best, -------Ed

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