[In the following excerpt, Blake commends Hair's atmosphere of “great good fun,” but cautions against the film's tendency to sanitize historical events.]

Sanitizing the past is easier than living with ugly memories. Self-exoneration is, of course, a key motive for reshaping the past. Today, for example, people who admit they once admired Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against Communists (and, incidentally, the Constitution) are as rare as those who can recall their enthusiasm for stopping the Red menace in Vietnam. Everybody, it seems, was on the right side from the beginning. The practice of selective memory is harmless enough until it leads to self-delusion. Moreover, simplifying complex periods of history reduces movements to morality plays, and simplistic morality plays can be terribly hollow.

Hair, even without its famous nude scene, was an exciting, even shocking political statement when it opened on Broadway 11 years ago. Not only was it the Magna Carta of the new life style, it reversed the traditional hero and villain roles of American morality plays. Drugs, vulgarity, long hair, loud music and irresponsible sex were good. The U. S. Government and convention, known in some circles as civilization, were bad. The Visigoths had their revenge at long last. It was an ugly period in American history and many of the scars have yet to heal. We just pay less attention to them.

In movie recollection, however, the age of the “flower children” has become one grand, happy love-in, bubbling with youth, vitality and freedom. In the meantime, the establishment was busy napalming civilians in the process of losing a war that was a mistake from the outset. How clear is the logic of memory! The ruined lives of drug addicts and professional (now middle-aged) dropouts, the cultivated rootlessness, alienation and the death of civility can be forgotten as easily as the disillusion of embittered veterans. It was an age of Byronic romanticism, intoxicating and suicidal.

If one is old enough to forget, or young enough not to remember, Hair can be enjoyed as the great good fun it was intended to be. The plot is, after all, incidental to the music and dance. A young enlistee from Oklahoma comes to New York for induction, meets a band of what were once called “hippies” in Central Park and learns to do the scene with them: hashish, skinny-dipping, trashing an establishment party and jail. He eventually goes through basic training, and his Central Park cronies come out to visit him before he ships out for Vietnam. Through an unlikely twist of events and a case of mixed identities, the slapstick comedy turns to tragedy.

Hair is first of all a musical, and the score by Galt MacDonald has aged remarkably well. The opening proclamation of “The Age of Aquarius” is thrilling. “Easy To Be Hard,” a lament sung by a young, abandoned mother, is guaranteed to bring sustained and deserved applause from misty-eyed popcorn munchers. Twyla Tharp's choreography adds the athletic angularity of Merce Cunningham's modern dance to the geometric energy of Agnes DeMille's screen style. The result is breathtaking, literally.

Milos Forman, the director, was still making films in Czechoslovakia when Hair came to Broadway. In The Firemen's Ball (1968), the establishment, a local fire company, is the target for his irreverent satire, since the Communist Government at that time was not noted for its ability to enjoy satire aimed explicitly at itself. By the time the good villagers discover the modest corruption in the raffle, the ball is a complete shambles. Working in this country, Forman has turned his dislike for establishments from the Communists to repressive American institutions, like the mental hospital he portrayed in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Hair is a continuation of this theme in Forman's work and, luckily for him and his audiences, he was not in this country during the war-protest movement. His film is playful and bright, even though the times were not.