So fresh in their day, so au courant, these campus movies have not aged well — by that I mean they have lapsed into obscurity, less well remembered by the general public than all those westerns and war movies and monster flicks. Millennials snigger at their fashions, conservatives bristle at their politics and (it’s a fair cop) naivete, and they tend to get relegated to the bin of oddments, relics.
And yet it’s rewarding to go back and see something like THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT or THE REVOLUTIONARY, which had the temerity to stick with a consistent perspective, that of youth, and follow it to, if not an inevitable conclusion, then at least a logical and fair one. At age 24, Bruce Davison and Kim Darby were not too far grown to play college undergrads and costar Bud Cort was a year behind them. (…)
I guess it’s worth noting that the same year THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT was released, Davison starred as a wacked out youth in WILLARD and Bud Cort as a wacked out youth in BREWSTER MCCLOUD – both of whom wind up dead by the final frames. Darby was a hippie in NORWOOD, also released in 1970, and her character winds up pregnant, as she had in GENERATION to boot.
