Movies and TV Shows

Tonight I felt like revisiting an old favorite, so I put on Hair (1979).

This is a particularly important film for me. I was already a long-haired weirdo who had just discovered Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles when I first saw a scene from this movie play on TV, probably on MTV or VH1. It was the jail scene, where the Tribe sings the title track, Hair. It was like someone had pulled all the words I could never find to explain why I looked the way I did out of my brain and set them to music. I asked my parents if they had ever heard the song before, and my mother pulled out her box of vinyl records. She handed me a stack including the albums for not only Hair, but Jesus Christ: Super Star and, bizarrely, Monty Python Sings, a collection of the songs from their movies. I was obsessed. I started making my own tie-dye and wearing Buddhist prayer flags as headbands, and I wore so many beads and bangles that I sounded like a walking beaded curtain.

We lived in a small town in Texas, and not only did I not look, act, or dress like the other kids my age, I didn't even fit in with the other weirdos, because I was fixated on a counter-culture that was decades in the grave. My folks probably should have taken that as a sign to have me evaluated for autism on its own, but the mainstream understanding of neurodivergency at the time was, let's say, lacking. I watched the film version of the musical a lot during those years, and it paved the way for me to discover Rocky Horror, and Little Shop of Horrors, and a whole universe of weirdos who served as my guiding stars throughout my childhood.

When I was 16, we took a trip to New York and spent ten days in Manhattan, during which I got to see the Hair revival off-Broadway. During the ending reprise of Flesh Failures (Let the Sun Shine In) the cast started pulling people out of the crowd to dance. I was, predictably, fully adorned in my home-made hippie accoutrements, and they pulled me up on stage to dance and sing with the main cast. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, and one of the touchstone moments that helped me start to explore my identity and self-image with a confidence and validation that I had never felt before.

All of that is to say that I have no way of objectively approaching a review of this film. It is too wrapped up in core associations for me to disentangle, so I'm going to just get the rating out of the way up front, and give it a glorious 5/5, with the understanding that you may feel very differently about it.

The film follows the plot of the stage musical pretty closely, though it omits several of the best songs, it does incorporate some elements that were impossible on stage, like live animals and vehicles. We begin with Claude Hooper Bukowski (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) leaving his home in Oklahoma, sharing a touching moment with his father before boarding the bus to New York, and the Induction Center. As he travels across the country we see the countryside give way to New England cities and a funky riff falls in. In short order Claude finds himself in Manhattan and we get our first glimpse of the Tribe, a street-roaming gang of hippies led by George Berger (Treat Williams, Deep Rising). The opening number, Aquarius, is performed by Renn Woods, and her flower-studded afro is a glory to behold.

The core members of the Tribe besides Berger are Hud (Dorsey Wright), Woof (Don Dacus, who played guitar with Stephen Stills and Chicago in the 70s), and Jeannie (Annie Golden) who is pregnant with either Hud or Woof's child. We first see the Tribe as they burn their draft cards, panhandle around central park, and mildly harass the horseback-mounted Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), a privileged college student and debutante. After meeting Claude and acquiring some cash, the Tribe rent a horse of their own and Woof serenades Sheila and her friends with the single funniest song in the film, Sodomy.​

The next song is Donna/Hashish, led by Berger, which plays out over Claude re-encountering the Tribe and joining up with them to smoke dope and sleep on the street. This transitions into Colored Spade, an intensely racially charged number that is well done in the film, but was absolutely electric to see live. It consists entirely of Hud calling out slurs that he's been identified with, and when the actor who performed the song in the revival gave his rendition he roared the words into the crowd like a challenge. The film's rendition is comparably much more sedate, but a little of that anger does bleed through, particularly as the song is framed as a response to Woof's racism and the possibility that Jeannie's baby will be black. Hud is proud to be a young, strong, black man, and he wants his potential child to share that pride (although this exchange feels very different in hindsight after later revelations regarding Hud's character).

Claude, being a newcomer to pot-smoking and the general hippie lifestyle, is rendered nearly catatonic by the hash smoke. He eventually comes around to the number Manchester​, where first Berger, then Claude profess "I believe in God, and I believe that God believes in Claude, that's me!"

The racial tension between Hud and Woof is then resolved during the song I'm Black/Ain't Got No, which was covered and mashed up with the song from later in the musical, I Got Life​ in an incredible performance by Nina Simone, which you should absolutely watch if you are a music lover.

The following day, Claude awakens on the street, huddled amongst the Tribe, and begins to wander off, unsure of how to proceed after his brush with a wild lifestyle unlike anything he had experienced before. I identify so strongly with Claude during the first half of this movie. I too was once a painfully naive hick encountering drugs and parties and rebellion for the first time, and everything from his posture to his awkward, halting gait is painfully familiar to me. When Berger calls out to him and asks him to come back, a little bit of the brittle icy shell surrounding my heart melts away.

The party in question is a high-society function where Sheila, the horse girl, will be debuting. Both Berger and Claude seem to have taken an interest in the Sheila, and so the Tribe attends, having seen the announcement in a paper that Berger was pissing on. In the stage version there is an incredible song, My Conviction in which a posh party goer expressed her (contextually) hot take of the evening, that long hair and decoration on men is the natural way of things, and should be embraced instead of rejected. It is a real shame that the film skips over it, although a 'lady in pink' as she is credited, is featured who is clearly meant to be the character from the stage version. She enthusiastically dances with Berger atop the banquet tables and admires his grungy style.

After delivering his rendition of I Got Life (Which is just so good) Berger and the rest of the tribe, including Claude, are arrested and thrown in jail. This is where the title song, Hair, comes in, and the film presents it in a very cool way, by having the opening stanzas delivered as Woof's internal monologue as he decides how to respond to the prison psychologist's questions. It's a great song, and I find myself singing it under my breath absolutely all the time. The interview also includes a fantastic exchange when she asks Woof if he's a homosexual and he responds "I wouldn't kick Mick Jagger out of my bed, but no, I'm not a homosexual." which I also spend a lot of time thinking about.

Then, for the first time, Claude's relationship with the Tribe is tested. He has the cash to pay his fine and walk free, but only enough to free himself. He likes Berger, and he seems fond of Jeannie too, but he's just met these people and they've already gotten him thrown in jail. Eventually Berger's charm offensive breaks through his barriers though, and Claude gives Berger the money instead, so that Berger can go round up enough cash to spring the rest of them. This he accomplishes by first carjacking Sheila and her brother Steve (Miles Chapin) and asking them for the dough, and eventually by going home and asking his folks. Berger's mother, played by Antonia Rey, is delightful, and we see a brief glimpse of the life that Berger and presumably the rest of the Tribe have given up to roam the streets and live among the hippies, weirdos, and dropouts.

The next segment of the film, as in the stage version, depicts Claude and the Tribe attending an anti-war rally and dropping acid, with it being Claude's first experience. The LSD/dream sequence isn't particularly true to my experiences with acid, but John Savage's facial performance certainly is. He rattles between terror and ecstasy as the experience washes over him, colored by the marriage proposal that Jeannie has just laid before him as a way to escape the draft (as they don't take married men with children). Eventually Claude runs off into the crowd, overwhelmed by the experience.

In the stage production there is a somewhat controversial group nude scene during the song Where Do I Go? which is replaced in the film by a skinny dipping sequence, where we mostly see Beverly D'Angelo topless. The song instead plays out as Claude roams the city, angry at a prank played by Berger, as well as frustrated at the casual disdain they have for his decision to go through with his induction. It's a solid song and a solid performance. The nudity in the stage version, even in the early runs of the musical, is extremely brief and mostly serves as a reference to a tactic used by real anti-war protesters. It was pretty cool as a 16 year old seeing nudity and the human body celebrated instead of shamed, and by a huge crowd of people, for probably the first time in my life.

Claude's wandering finally delivers him to the induction office and we get one of the most hilarious scenes in both versions. As the parade of nude inductees (including one young man who refuses to remove his socks until he is physically hoisted into the air and they are pulled from his feet to reveal a fully painted set of toenails) are presented to the Army staff, we get the songs Black Boys and White Boys which unabashedly celebrate the female gaze (and in the film version, the Gays as well). The juxtaposition of the raunchy sex-positive musical number and the fact that Claude is (seemingly) passing the point of No Return makes this a weird one, but they're such fun songs that you'd hardly notice on the first viewing. Afterwards Claude is whisked away to boot camp where he undergoes basic training set to Walking in Space which rises to the repeated phrase "My eyes are open" as the reality of his situation begins to finally set in.

There is a time-skip, where the intermission takes place in the stage version, and then the narrative picks up again at wintertime. Sheila receives a letter from Claude, and shares it with the Tribe. As they are discussing a trip to go visit him at the military base in Nevada where he is being trained, a woman and a small child approach the group. The woman calls out to Hud, calling him by the name LaFayette, and asking him what he's doing there, with those people. Asking him if the visibly pregnant Jeannie is carrying his child. This is, despite the deeply bittersweet ending, the emotional low point of the film and the musical. Cheryl Barns, playing Hud's jilted fiance and the mother of his already existing child, belts out a rendition of Easy To Be Hard, demanding to know "how can people be so heartless?" that brings me to full-on tears every single time.

If this movie has a single, serious flaw, it is that Hud's treatment of his fiance, left unnamed, is forgiven nearly instantly by the film, if not the character. There is an inkling that Hud is not a true flower child, committed to peace and love and harmony, so much as a selfish asshole who abandoned his old life and responsibilities to pursue easy sex and drugs among the free love generation. We see him arguing angrily with the other members of the Tribe between devastating shots of Barns' solo, but the content of that argument is not shared with us, and we simply have to accept, as the fiance apparently does, that some resolution has occurred. A later moment between Jeannie and the fiance gives the lie to this, but from that point on she and LaFayette Jr. silently accompany the Tribe on the next leg of their adventure. Jeannie comes across as cruelly blind to the suffering of this poor woman, and Hud is actively hostile to her the entire time.

I don't now why Hud was singled out to be the only member of the Tribe who is depicted as a genuinely bad or selfish person, but it gives us the most powerful solo in the film, so there is some good that comes of it. A charitable reading of the Hud situation might tie it into the otherwise fairly subtle critique of the flower-power generation that runs throughout the film, where the members of the hippie community that are the most vocal about peace, love, and understanding are sometimes the least committed to living that lifestyle, and even members of radical social-justice movements can be blind to the injustices occurring under their own roofs. The fringe lifestyle led by the hippies was deeply appealing to a lot of narcissistic abusers because of the permissive attitudes towards sex, drugs, and alternative philosophies. Hud represents those people, and it's a little weird that there are no consequences for his actions whatsoever.

The tribe carjacks Steve a second time, picking up Sheila in the process, and make their way to Nevada to visit Claude before he ships out to Vietnam. The song Three-Five-Zero-Zero is another racially charged anti-war number, inspired by a Ginsberg poem, and rising to an upbeat chant of "Prisoners in N*****town, it's a dirty little war" which I felt guilty just hearing on the record as a kid, but it has remained with me as a powerful mental image my entire life. It is arranged with What a Piece of Work is Man, and the jolly recitation of the violent phrases helps drive home the horror settling down on Claude despite his best efforts to hide it. In the film the songs play out over a hijacked PA system at the base as well as at another anti-war demonstration in Washington DC, and there is a bit of vaudevillian humor as soldiers try desperately to turn off the music.

Once the Tribe arrives in Nevada they engage in some more carjacking and kidnapping, this time of an Army officer, in order to sneak onto the base, where Berger takes Claude's place while he visits with the rest of the Tribe. One of the funniest lines in the movie comes as Berger, dressed as an Army officer and with freshly cut hair, orders Claude out of the barracks and into his waiting car. Maintaining his drill sergeant voice, Berger demands of Claude "Are you an Asshole, soldier?" and when Claude responds 'No sir' he fires back "Well that's too bad, because I am" and reveals his identity. It's a great moment.

While the two are switched, orders to deploy come down, and Berger is marched onto a plane with Claude's unit, reprising Manchester and singing out "I believe that God believes in Claude, that's me!" as though trying to convince himself, while the chorus chants "the rest is silence" behind him. Manchester becomes Good Morning Starshine/Flesh Failures and Berger's fate is made immediately clear as we jump to the tribe visiting his grave at Arlington. It is a startlingly bleak ending to a musical that deals with some heavy themes but is overall very cheerful and funny throughout. The refrain of Let the Sun Shine In is as powerful today as it was the first time I heard it. The credits roll to footage of hundreds of hippies descending on the White House lawn, singing those words, in a spectacle that recreated for the film, at almost full scale, the anti-war demonstrations that had occurred there only a decade prior in real life.

This is already a much longer review than I intended, so I will sum up my thoughts here. Hair is a triumph of musical theater, and the film adaptation does a fantastic job of translating the experience from the stage to the screen. There are a lot of great songs missing, but that is only because there are no bad songs in the musical, so any cuts will necessarily be bangers. I have strong mixed feelings about the character of Hud and the way that the film treats his transgressions, but overall the social commentary on offer is sharp, funny, and uncompromising. The music composed by Galt Macdermot and the lyrics written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado are as powerful as they are endlessly listenable. This film means so very much to me, as a turning point in my own life, and as a piece of that weird filmic vision of the past into which I so frequently find myself yearning to escape. I stand by my score of 5/5. There are elements that could be worth docking a half star here or there, but overall this film truly is a masterpiece.