[In the following review, Westerbeck offers a negative assessment of Hair, criticizing Forman's understanding of American culture and the editing of the film's dance sequences.]

No one lives in the Age of Aquarius today. Its “dawning,” celebrated ten years ago in the musical Hair, turned out to be its twilight as well. Still, Hair remains pertinent. It continues to tell us something about our collective life as Americans. Popular shows usually do this. They are a revelation to us of ourselves, especially shows that are surprisingly popular as Hair was. Hair was made on the novel premise that the hippies weren't really alienated from America. They were an expression of it. Whether this was true for hippies themselves or not, it was true enough for other Americans to make Hair enormously successful. On the one hand, people came into New York from Connecticut, Connecticut to see the show because they also yearned to be FREE, somehow, and Hair assuaged those yearnings. On the other hand, Hair made freedom safe. It made it into entertainment. It made hippies appealing and familiar. In Hair, the commune and the crash pad and the demonstration in the streets became a new kind of togetherness, a renewed and ideal Melting Pot. The show recognized in the dawn of its own new age the twilight's last gleaming for certain American dreams still widely cherished.

Hair was therefore not as hard to adapt to the screen ten years later as it might seem. The thing to do was get Milos Forman to direct the film [Hair]. Forman is one of those Europeans whose perception of America is too weak and superficial to be dangerous. He is an immigrant Magoo, avoiding most harm and confusion in American culture by being oblivious to them. Since Forman didn't feel any of the rougher barbs and burrs in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he could certainly be trusted with Hair, which had far less potential for hard truths. Innocent adaptations of modern classics is becoming Forman's specialty. He flies across the Atlantic in jumbo-jet style, without paying any attention to the storm-tossed seas and swirling clouds beneath him. If there was any wildness or vexation with which the immediacy of the Vietnam war endowed the stage version of Hair, Forman hasn't responded to it in the movie. He has seen and elaborated only those aspects of the Broadway original which made it widely popular. In the true tradition of musicals, he has accentuated the positive, eliminated the negative, and not messed with Mr. In-Between.

During the Depression, when the movie musical was being invented, what kept America going was the feeling that we were all in the same boat. Forman's Hair has a similar vision of America, except that what we're all in now is a Lincoln Continental. That's what all the principals in Hair finally get in to drive and sing their way cross-country. It's a real ethnic Ark. In the original Hair the thing that all the street people had in common was their rootlessness. No one had a background or a home. Everybody was free-floating—a condition epitomized by the song “Frank Mills” in which a girl had tragically lost her boyfriend's address. But “Frank Mills” is one of the songs dropped from the movie version, where family backgrounds and off-stage homes are created for the major characters. It's as if Forman were trying to make more explicit the connection of these hippies with America at large—as if he were afraid the rest of us Americans might miss the point.

The Lincoln contains every race, creed and social persuasion—a very straight black lady and her little boy (archetypes of the new black bourgeoisie in the post-Hair era) along with a newly liberated debutante from Westchester and a drop-out from a lower-middle-class home in Queens. The only important character not in the car is Claude Bukowsky (John Savage), whom the movie turns into a cowboy from Oklahoma. The car is, however, on its way to rescue Bukowsky from the military. We visit each of these characters from the original Hair in the different economic and regional background the movie has created for him. This is the movie's way of making them all more representative, like Congress.

The greatest innovation the movie has is its choreography by Twyla Tharp. Galt MacDermot's music with its fast, changing tempos meshes beautifully with the jerky, dislocated dancing that Tharp creates. The opening performance of “Aquarius” done in Central Park is almost strong enough by itself to carry the rest of the film on its flying coat tails. Yet the choreography finally seems, like the trite plot that the film manufactures around the original characters, only a way to keep us distracted—a way to keep any unpleasant associations in Ragni and Rado's lyrics at arm's length. This intention is especially apparent in the movie's brief reprise of the song “Three-Five-Zero-Zero,” which makes music out of military body counts. In the Broadway version this song was a lead-in to “What a Piece of Work Is Man,” with lyrics by William Shakespeare. In the movie Shakespeare is cut, and “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” becomes a couple of minutes of cut-aways from a slapstick review of the troops at Bukowsky's boot camp.

Forman's editing of the dance sequences—lots of medium shots very rapidly spliced together—obstructs our view of the dancing itself. It gives the choreography the maddening quality of a dance seen under one of those bright, blipping strobe lights at a disco. It makes the dancing paradoxically static, as if we were seeing a series of quickly glimpsed tableaux or freeze frames. Or perhaps these are scenes from an American Pompeii that was cataclysmically suspended in time ten years ago and is only now being unearthed again by Forman's movie. Or maybe the editing in the dance sequences is just Forman's way of using his camera to break the original Hair into pieces, so it will fit into the Melting Pot once again. Maybe this movie is just our way of scrapping the hippies once and for all.