I.

JUST A FEW days ago Otto Preminger leaned back in time to find a previous rationale. He was answering questions for a small group of film critics, fans, maybe up-and-coming Premingers. A black student had just informed the Viennese-born director that the stereotype black roles in Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1966) were racist. "Nobody, NOBODY just sits there and sings spirituals when their house is being attacked by armed men," the young black man had affirmed. Preminger leaned into the microphone to reply,

"That's not something I invented, you know. That's the way things really are down there."

Not exactly pleased, the black man tried to respond but Otto Preminger, whose head looks something like a marble bowling ball which someone once tried to dribble, had called upon another raised hand.

What looked, like your artsy-drugsy radical asked the wealthy director, "What do you think about what's happening in America today?"

"In what way?" Otto said, slightly chuckling.

The audience slightly chuckled.

"Politically..."

"Politically, yes..." and Otto unrolled opinions formed long ago. They began "Everywhere around the world young people become active at about seventeen or eighteen. Students always want their say...": two questions and two prepared statements later he ended with "you should work on the improvement of the system rather than overthrow it."

Some people had thought Preminger to be a quasi-radical for filming Exodus. The pro-Jewish liberation content made martyrs of the extremists-terrorists who were instrumental in the overthrow of the system. ( cf. Battle of Algiers ) But times had changed.

"Would you make a film about the Panthers?" someone asked.

"That's different. Things are happening every day. Things change too fast. By the time I made such a film it would be no longer valid. Look at Strawberry Statement -by the time it was released, it was no longer valid. In the meantime, four students were killed."

II.

THERE are several reasons why The Strawberry Statement and its counterpart, Getting Straight, do not explain the "youth culture," the "campus unrest," or any of various movements which people refer to as "the revolution."

Someone in Hollywood must have read Rich Zorza's The Right to Say We. One Harvard freshman is quoted in that account of the 1969 Harvard strike as saying: Commercial film is now telling us that we are taking over buildings for the same reason it used to tell us we went to college-to catch, if we are male, at least one female sex-slave or, if we are female, a larger-than-life college man for a husband.

It is the thesis of these films that student violence can be explained away with an ounce of Spock, a pound of Kenniston, and a ton of Freud. Sex, fun and games: youth culture films attempt to portray student-police confrontation as the new campus sport. Students are heavily gassed inside an enclosed building but they can still run and sing for minutes and even gang up on an isolated policeman. The students cough: they bleed; they cry-but it is all razzle-dazzle ball and tonight they will exaggerate their battle wounds so they can sleep with the sexy chick or that long-haired John Wayne who served in "the Sorbonne, Berkeley, and now here."

Our parents can go see these movies and have the satisfaction of remarking "Oh, look! It's their version of the panty raid!" Suddenly, radicals are clean, attractive (long hair for men is now as chic in Hollywood as in Cambridge), and loveable kids who are merely frustrated by puritanical school mating policies, by strict drug laws, by the draft and the war it serves.