Simon (Bruce Davison) is an apolitical college rower in San Francisco. He is indifferent to the mounting protest on campus about stealing an African-American playground for the ROTC headquarter. He drops by to watch the protest and is taken with Linda (Kim Darby). He follows her into a student takeover of the administration building.

This is a counter-culture film or a counter-counter-culture film. It could be a simple straight stiff turns hippie radical. It does take some unexpected turns. He's not a simple nice guy. There are darker edges. The couple has a difficult encounter with the very black people that they're trying to help. It's not all flower power. I don't buy the shopkeeper. His actions don't feel right. It would be so much better for him to placate and cooperate with the couple before calling the cops. Instead, he's raising his hands which make it less shocking to have him call for the cops. Anyways, it all struck me wrong. There are a couple of notable actors but mostly it looks like an amateur cast. Kim Darby is cute coming a year after True Grit. It all adds up to a lesser, interesting counter-culture film.

Will this significant film ever get a DVD release? Probably not, assuming that music clearance is an issue--and when one of the artists involved is Neil Young, the odds probably lengthen. Bruce Davison is excellent as Simon, a straight college student who finds himself caught up in the seething ferment of campus politics in the late 1960s. The film accurately depicts the confusion and unfocused rage of young people in those far off days, when issues as disparate as the Vietnam War and town-gown relationships united a broad coalition of activists. In retrospect it's easy to see the flaws in such a 'wide-net' approach--heck, it's a flaw that plagues what remains of the 'New Left' to this day--but the film is an invigorating reminder of a time when real change actually seemed possible. An MGM production, The Strawberry Statement recently aired in a heavily redacted, pan and scan print on TCM: almost all the cuss words and nudity is cut, and there's even some fogging in a shower scene to protect us from Davison's penis. Happily, the film is strong enough to withstand such indignities and is still worth seeing.

The money men at MGM let the kids act out in this shrill protest film against the establishment (themselves)in this sloppy and incoherent tract made fresh on the heels of the Kent State Massacre. It is one bad temper tantrum.

It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarious (Tune in, turn on, drop out.) and the kids have had it with the hypocrisy of their square and out of touch elders who lack their social conscious and righteous dude ethos. Simon (Bruce Davison) a jock on a crew team is at first bemused by the social action of a student group that takes over the dean's office but soon sees the light and is radicalized and ready to stand against the big bad oppressive monolith known as the system. Along the way he hooks up with an innocent and out of touch co-ed (Kim Darby's fashion statement says it all) who soon finds herself dragged into the maelstrom. Things ratchet up and we soon have the fascist pigs gassing and pummeling the beautiful people while an indifferent public at large looks on and in one case wonders if her laundry is done.

Made during a period (Easy Rider) when moguls thought youth was on to something and bank rolled their ideas The Strawberry Statement's let it all hang out style of patchy editing and bad acid camera-work is one visual downer as it clumsily jostles you along with leap cuts from one tantrum to the next. Prolific scribbler Israel Horovitz's scenario is filled with all the requisite cliché blather that puts the students into realpolitik mode but he seems at a loss to flesh out his characters beyond their smug sarcasm and hip attitude.

There's an excellent soundtrack of Neil Young tunes along with CS&N and a warbly rendition of Circle Game by Buffy Saint Marie that supplies some energy to this torpid and hackneyed lecture that the US has lost its moral compass but unfortunately the overheated passions get lost in the fog of tear gas and self righteous tedium all haphazardly put together by a director (Stuart Haggman) and cinematographer (John Woolsey) who look like they cut one too many film studies classes.