Decent kid named Simon (Bruce Davison), a university student at Berkeley who works hard on the rowing team and lives off-campus, volunteers for a student strike for peace and is soon radicalized by a pretty girl he falls for (Kim Darby). She and her anti-authoritarian, anti-racism friends are rebelling against the school administration, and are willing to fight the cops and go to jail for their rights. Time-capsule movie about the effects of student demonstration, from James Kunen's novel "The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary", boasts a talented cast and a good rock soundtrack, but it's too dated and superficial to make a big impact. Director Stuart Hagmann spells everything out in elemental visual terms: in the opening scan of the protagonist's apartment, we see a poster of Robert Kennedy (telling us Simon is a Democrat), a cut-out of a naked girl (Simon is straight), cockroaches he talks to and doesn't kill (Simon is a pacifist), soundtrack albums of "Doctor Zhivago" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Simon is a romantic and a film-lover); meanwhile, the protesters throw a dummy off the school roof covered with slogans, they hang a sign saying "Revolt" on a university statue, they've put up posters of Che Guevara on the walls. Hagmann doesn't seem to be interested in the young people as individuals, anyway; he wants to make statements of his own--arty statements in montages depicting how the archaic brass misunderstands "the movement", and how youthful anarchy leads to violence because "the pigs" want it that way, not the kids. But blaming the proverbial escalation into bloodshed completely on the police doesn't wash here when the demonstrators appear to be spoiled, upper-class, would-be martyrs. The clichés are thick and come at us continuously, curdling on the screen and turning the film into an overeager potboiler. *1/2 from ****
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