[In the following review, Champlin assesses the strengths of Hair, calling the film a “poignant reminder” of America during the Vietnam War era.]

Fresh off the bus, duffel bag in hand, the boy from Oklahoma stares in wonderment. A happening is happening in Central Park, Manhattan Island, U.S.A., vintage '60s. Crazy kids with long hair and costume clothes are sporting on the greensward. Then, like a foreboding shadow, two mounted policemen invade the scene, towering over it and monstrously silhouetted, keep the sunshine out.

It looks like curtains for our new friends. But no: The cops' handsome horses break into a sashaying circus two-step in nice time to the rollicking music.

In its sly and marvelous surprise, and in its artful melding of a breezy and literally open-air naturalism with the stylized inventions of the musical form, the introduction of the prancing steeds gets the triumphant Milos Forman film of Hair away to an invigorating, delighting start.

Thereafter, for just over two swift hours, the movie's moods and settings vary dramatically, but its energy, invention and charm never falter.

THE BEST SINCE CABARET

Hair is the best film musical since Cabaret and, like Cabaret, it is a fine and innovative use of the medium and an entertainment that is also an illumination of history. Hair, of course, is even more than a look at history, it is a piece of history.

It was the musical that more than any other captured the tumultuous spirits of the young American '60s: the roaring sounds of its music and the look of its celebrants, the defiance of a tethering past, the protests against present injustices and against Vietnam most crucially, the lyrical optimism of a new age dawning.

Hair had its premiere nearly a dozen years ago, and somehow the '60s already seem an era as echoing but closed as the Roaring Twenties or the depressed '30s. The movie in part thus becomes a reprise of history, overlaid now with many new emotions, most powerfully a bitter-sweet nostalgia, combining a feeling of pride with a sense of loss, for those whose time was the '60s.

MORE THAN AN ARTIFACT

But Hair is more than an artifact. It is hugely appealing as a movie, bursting with vitality and dazzling in its displays of song and dance, and ingratiating in its choice of protagonists.

John Savage (Robert DeNiro's surviving pal in The Deer Hunter) is the Oklahoma ranch boy come to New York for a quick look at the bright lights before he goes (unquestioningly enough) into the Army and probably off to Vietnam. (Savage's role in The Deer Hunter gives his appearance in Hair an eerie and unexpected additional resonance.)

Treat Williams as Berger is the leader of the free-spirited group—hippies now sounds as antiquated as jazzbabies or hepcats—Savage falls in with in Central Park. Annie Golden is the sweetly rumpled earth mother of the group, Dorsey Wright and Don Dacus the other regulars. Beverly D'Angelo (marvelous again as she was in First Love and Every Which Way but Loose) is the rich girl from New Jersey who gallops into the lives of the quintet. They are all expert and likable in equal measure.

The push to the outdoors, to natural settings, that Francis Ford Coppola gave the musical with his Finian's Rainbow, has been pushed still further by Forman and choreographer Twyla Tharp. The exuberant rompings through the park and up and down its steps and balustrades and benches are, for example, contagiously thrilling to watch.

It is also striking to realize just how much a part of the national musical heritage the music of Galt McDermot and the lyrics of Gerome Ragni and James Rado have become. “The Age of Aquarius,” “Good Morning, Starshine” and “Let the Sun Shine In” really were anthems of an era, and they retain their power to lift the spirit.

As he did in Taking Off and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Forman proves to be a keen-eyed observer of American manners and milieus, and suggests that the comic vision is universal. A formal garden party in suburban New Jersey (with Richard Bright as a rich kid not sure how to cope with some flower-powered crashers) is a very funny and satirical stretch, leading to a riotous sitdown banquet at which Treat Williams runs splendidly amok in “I Got Life.”

Hair lends itself well to a cinematic opening-up and Forman and his cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek lead us a grand chase from snowy city to sun-baked desert Army base (the setting in part of another piece of comic story-telling) to an extraordinary gathering at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

From a striking piece of recent American cultural history, Forman has fashioned a timelessly impressive example of the art of movie making. What is also interesting is that simply as an expression of protest and affirmative change, Hair does not seem to have grown dated or lost its relevance or its appeal.

The cultural shock of long hair (as the central symptom of a whole package of change) may have subsided and the package been assimilated by the middle class (on which it is not invariably becoming) and made safe.

Yet the need to let sunshine in does not appear to have vanished with the '60s, nor the need to challenge conventional wisdom and to commit to causes of conscience. If some of the druggy adventuring of the '60s looks now like a wasting self-indulgence, Hair is in the end a poignant reminder that the decade's bloody backdrop was Vietnam and that its lingering lessons nearly all relate to that conflict, home and abroad.

The nudity, which was part of the notoriety of Hair in its early days, is recalled in the movie, but in so evolved (and so relatively restrained) a way that the rating is not unreasonably PG, which means not least that the early teenagers will have a chance to see what made the '60s unforgettable for their elders.

Lester Persky and Michael Butler were the producers. Galt McDermot arranged and conducted his own music and Michael Weller did the script.