Movie Psychedelia Out of Time

I was back in the sixties again over the weekend.  Most specifically, that bit near the end of the decade when, in the wake of the Beatles releasing 'Sgt Pepper', everything went weird and psychedelic and Hollywood started green lighting films that most certainly wouldn't have been made at any other time.  Actually, I say the sixties, but the film that set off this train of thought, Roger Corman's Gasss, or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970), arrived just too late for the party, finally getting a full release in 1971.  Knowing this makes its channeling of the essence of sixties counter culture, from its animated titles to its meandering road trip format to its 'anything goes' freaked out finale, seem even more jarring than such things normally do when viewed at a distance of half a century or so.  Because it is so psychedelic sixties that it feels as if it has come from another reality, let alone a different decade.  Corman throws in every late sixties stereotype imaginable - hippies, peaceniks, bikers, youth culture, free love, the breakdown of capitalist society, (he even adds in some of his own stereotypes: Edgar Allan Poe roars around on a motorbike, raven on his shoulder and Lenore on the pillion, commenting on the action) - making the film not just disjointed, but also very hit and miss.  The basic idea of an escape of gas from a military base, which results in everyone over twenty five dying, seems a promising start for a satire on youth culture, but the film never pursues this in a coherent plot, (unlike the thematically similar Wild in the Streets (1968)), instead opting for an episodic structure centered on a road trip.  The episodes focus on the main characters' encounters with the various new social groups that have sprung up in the aftermath of the gas leak.  While some of these, like the bikers-turned-golf-club episode, more or less succeed in their satire, others, particularly the college football team-turned-brigands episode, quickly become tiresome. 

It has to be said that, on a technical level, Gasss looks great for a low budget movie, with superb photography and inventive use of locations.  Even the performances from a largely unfamiliar cast, (although it does feature an early performance from Ben Vereen), aren't distractingly flat, as is often te case in such situations.  But it just doesn't hold together either as film, satire or political statement, (as most films of this type and era invariably were).  According to Corman, the problem lay with the cuts made to the film by distributors AIP, (it was to be his last collaboration with the company), which robbed the film of coherence.  This, of course, was denied by AIP, which pointed out that the editors they used had been approved by Corman and had worked with him in the past, but had trouble putting the footage together in any coherent way.  Whatever the case, the film's sub ninety minute running time certainly suggests that cuts were made.  Corman's complaints mainly focused on the way in which the film's climax had been edited, with his original final shot, which, he claimed, would have given the film a better sense of conclusion, cut completely.  To be fair, the film as released does feel as if it simply runs out of ideas, culminating with a weird sequence in which just about everyone the main characters have met in the course of the movie climbing out of a hole in the ground, before a truck drives up and various dead counter culture icons - including Martin Luther King, JFK and Che - climb out.  Actually, it isn't so much that these icons emerge, but rather people wearing (not very good) papier mache heads in their likeness.  Apparently it is some kind of divine intervention by God Himself (his voice is heard here and at previous points in the film).

As I say, all typically sixties and, one can't help but feel, if Gasss had actually been released in the sixties, it might have been a box office success, with its freewheeling plot and surreal incident.  Indeed, I couldn't help but compare it to another quintessentially sixties film, Roger Marquand's Candy (1968), which had enjoyed some success on its release, (helped, no doubt, by being based on the best selling novel of the same name).   By sheer coincidence, I caught Candy on the Shout Cult streaming service the day after watching Gasss and it struck me how similar the films were.  It isn't just that both are structured as picaresque movies, with their main protagonists on a journey through a psychedelic landscape they struggle to understand, encountering various eccentric characters along the way.  The climaxes of both films bear a striking resemblance to each other as well, with Candy ending with the titular heroine climbing out of a hole and encountering all of the characters she has previously interacted with throughout the film.  This might also be taken as divine intervention, as her emergence from the hole was the result of the collapse of an underground temple, (where she has just unwittingly had an implied sexual encounter with her own father).  Not that I think that Gasss was a conscious imitation or parody of Candy, just that both films were typical of that era, embodying the same ideas and sensibilities so, naturally, tended toward similar formats.  It is just that one had the good fortune to actually be released while the sixties were still swinging, while the other missed the mark and found itself beached and stranded in a very different era, unsympathetic to its ideas.