I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and The Young Runaways

ALTHOUGH no particular reason exists to get upset about I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, a sombre little comedy about not nearly enough, we might as well face the fact that its existence and that of dozens of Hollywood hippie-movies will sooner or later necessitate some responsible discussion to our children, lest they accept a celluloid version of the swinging sixties. Now I have nothing against cheap legend, you understand; the prevalent romanticism of American narrative cinema provides a most captivating, not always inaccurate, cultural history of the U.S.A., sometimes useful as a frame of reference, always in our minds. Our grasp of the twenties and thirties cannot be divorced from icons remembered from countless gangster films and screwball comedies--anymore than we know the old west apart from the one given us by John Ford. These films are our memories of American life styles and geographies instinctively accessible although they existed before we were born.

Extending this tenuous hypothesis, there isn't anything wrong in living with a sense of the twenties and thirties dervied largely from films. The prevalent social movements were depicted by artists possessed of style, social vision, and unshakeable personal morality. Griffith's prohibition film, The Struggle, offers an audience an extraordinary perspective on an era, as do Lang's You Only Live Once, Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, and of course Welles's Citizen Kane.

But film-makers die, and the industry busily replaces its craftsmen with product-mongers who think only of mass audience and TV sales. Contemporary social phenomena, prevented from developing in peace, are instantly exploited by a Hollywood desperate to be the first on the marketing bandwagon. Thus Hollywood supplies a hippie to the curious netherworld between San Francisco and New York--a hippie one step closer to reality than John Wayne's faceless chattering Vietcong, but already a stock figure for a director to plug into any context available.

The synthehippie might make a passable reduction, were it not for the ignorance of its creators (many moviehippies expound at length on the differences between acid and LSD), and the aura of creeping Barry Goldwaterism expressed in (as far as I can detect) the first pejorative use of the word "love." When a moviehippie says he just wants to wander around loving everything in sight, we can almost always detect the tone of a lurking scriptwriter at some pains to imply that the sonofabitch ought to get off the streets and earn a decent living. Moviehippies are often surprisingly well-fed (as are, coincidentally, most actors), generally overdressed, spend inordinate amounts of time talking about flowers, don't (the lucky devils) take amphetamines, and in more serious films lean toward sexual perversion, destroy at random, and smell bad.

WELL, OKAY, on one level it's a simple cashing-in on cliche; certainly Hollywood provides a hippie guaranteed to satisfy any Kansas housewife steeped in instinctive hatred of a human species more reprehensible than the red menace. But given the lasting power of the film image, we are perhaps witnessing the commercial creation of a breed of hippie at the expense of the real animal. Assuming that the hippie movement goes the way of the flappers and beatniks, we run the risk of seeing them in fifty years only as they were given us by the commercial American cinema. I think the whole thing is insidious, and I hope it irritates you as much as it does me.

Two of these gentle frauds are in town this week. The cheaper is Arthur Dreifuss's The Young Runaways, produced by Sam Katzman, a second-rate Albert Zugsmith whose films are usually acted by racing cars. Inadvertantly, Runaways does more toward creating a semi-mythic subculture than Alice B. Toklas, in its strict adherence to the plot premise: everybody in The Young Runaways has runaways on their mind. It is as if Chicago, the film's location, were a vast playground given over to hide-and-seek.

Both films suffer from scriptwriters' inability to go beyond a simple extrapolation of the hippie into already familiar contexts: Alice B. Toklas might just as well be called Nichols and May Meet The Flower Children, its frame of reference entirely consisting of semi-improvised Jewish comedy prevalent in Neil Simon and lesser Feiffer. Runaways is structurally a simplistic morality play juggling black-and-white moral quantities with the vengeance of a true confessions magazine.

NONETHELESS, the potential for new formula exists in these films. We are familiar with the story of the country innocent corrupted by the wicked city, a plot-type appearing frequently from Griffith's Way Down East through Chabrol's Les Cousins. Hollywood has begun to alter this: the conclusion of the product-mongers appears to be that innocence--at least sexual innocence--no longer exists anywhere, certainly not in the country. Hollywood is probably right: God knows they helped make it that way, and God know there's no money to be made in innocence. The three runaways in Dreifuss's film aren't frustrated youths seeking knowledge and fulfillment, but jaded refugees from the hang-ups of social-realist films of the fifties, desperate to jump into the problems of the sixties. Similarly, the hashish-fudge that liberates Harold Fine (Peter Sellers) in Alice B. Toklas simply moves him in ten years away from a dated life-style toward the new and more-fashionable hangups of today.

Both films run afoul in failing to realize the potentials of this altered premise, offering instead an anticlimactic retreat to years-old cliche. The runaways in Chicago come up against syndicate prostitution and car theft, rather than amphetamine suicides, birth control, and police busts. Harold Fine's final disenchantment with his hippie existence is the combined result of (a) sexual jealousy, and (b) revulsion at how dirty hippies are (the screenplay sanctions the first, and seems deeply repelled by the latter), and leaves him at the finale in a limbo audiences would have found preposterous had not The Graduate conned Americans into thinking such endings dramatically justifiable.

Of more practical matters, let the record show that this reviewer found both movies atrociously filmed in ugly color, edited with the precision of a two-year-old turned loose with a jar of peanut butter, and inadequately acted by teen-agers who plainly considered themselves better than the people they were portraying. Brooke Bundy, the pretty blonde in Young Runaways, appears to have too many teeth, and Leigh Taylor-Young, the pretty blonde in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, learnt her eight lines and spoke them with something approaching conviction.