[In the following excerpt, Kauffmann examines the change of public perceptions and attitudes between the original theatrical production of Hair and the release of Forman's film adaptation.]

Hair (United Artists) is chockablock with imaginative lift and pyrotechnical dazzle, all of it apparently intended to forestall question. That question, of course, is: Is Hair dated? Well, most of the songs (most of which have been retained from the original score) are still engaging, and much of the filming is fine. But Hair, even with its now-blanched script, is about a subject, and 10 years have put that subject in a cooler light.

I saw the first production (1967) at the Public Theater in New York, and beyond this song or that performer, I remember feeling throughout the show that the whole high-ceilinged room was being charged with energy, compressed within the walls, and that the walls might burst. Besides its intrinsics, the show had the added power of the Right Moment. For young people, it was their generation's outburst of protest, of relief at being young so that—by non-involvement—they could plead “not guilty” to the corruption with which they charged their elders; for older people it was a reproof by vitality and innocence, reproof particularly about Vietnam.

The subsequent Broadway version seemed both sharper and flatter—sharpened a bit into slickness and flattened out of some of its seeming spontaneity—but its success, there and on the road and around the world, shook the show-biz seismograph. For a time the show had an aura of more than success. In the late 1960s I was on a TV panel in Chicago with a member of the Hair touring company who spoke apostolically about it as an instrument that would help to change the world.

The world certainly changed in the 10 years that followed, but one of the changes is that Hair and Hair-y matters are no longer looked to as instruments of change. Today's equivalent of the Hair generation is still a good-sized gap away from older generations but not because of any arrogation of moral superiority by the young. (For one point, the gap between the drafted and the drafters is gone.) This film of Hair was made too late for any spontaneous connection with that idea of youth's moral superiority which is still its base. Now our only connection with Hair is through its music (by Galt MacDermot); but in the past, though the music was world-famous, it seemed only one aspect of the work's larger existence.

Too recent to be historical even in an era of instant history, too remote to be “now,” the film had to be placed somewhere relatively out of time in order not to seem dated. That placement was in a context of cinematic splash—a cascade of visual ingenuities so often overwhelming that they almost disguise their (presumable) intent as salvage operation. The screenplay, taken from the original book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, was evolved by Michael Weller, author of Moonchildren (itself an irritatingly self-licking play about 1960s youth). The script tries to keep some motions of social protest, but they are all pallid dilutions. The real achievements are in the filmmaking itself.

Two Czech émigrés are central. I disliked the work of the director, Milos Forman, even before he emigrated. Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen's Ball were heavy with provincial genius. Forman's first American film, Taking Off, strained to prove that he was at home abroad, and didn't. Then he made One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, much of which was admirable, and I thought—still think—that the improvement owed something to the presence in the cast of Jack Nicholson, an experienced filmmaker. Hair doesn't need much veristic detail, it mostly exists in a limbo of fantastication, which seems to have touched the latent best in Forman.

Certainly he has been strengthened by working with Miroslav Ondricek with whom he had worked in Czechoslovakia. (A sequence after an LSD “communion” is right out of Czech symbolist films of the mid-1960s.) And the editing—by Lynzee Klingman with Stanley Karnow and Alen Hein—is miraculously deft, an imaginative achievement in itself.

Twyla Tharp's choreography—or rather the use of it by the filmmakers—helps to make the texture of the film. Clearly they all decided not to do a conventional musical with numbers, nor to do a conventional fantasy like The Wiz, but to create a free-floating work, hovering a few feet above visible reality and touching it only often enough to push off again. Tharp's movement-designs, running through, help to keep it all suprareal.

For a while, the film looks as if it's going to succeed. The opening sequence shows Claude—played with unostentatious reticence by John Savage of The Deer Hunter—leaving his ranch home and going to New York to be drafted. (No questions, please, about a westerner going to NY to report.) As his bus enters the Lincoln Tunnel, blackness hits the screen; then that blackness is flecked with lights—not headlights, as we soon see, but the lights of a celebration in Central Park (where Claude later appears), and the picture is off, or seems to be.

A lot of the blends and braids of the film are extremely clever, sometimes lyrically lovely. All the songs are well sung and are never simply “held” as songs: the camera movement and editing help to dramatize them. But the staled topicality of the original show keeps wearing through and distancing us. The small band of hippies led by Berger now seem only scruffy trarmps, not a statement of anything. Berger's courageous moral stances, in the light of the last 10 years and stripped of the horrible pressures of Vietnam, now seem merely juvenile and silly. And the oppressive Treat Williams in the role doesn't help.

When Berger leads his friends to a stately suburban home, where he dances on a long polished dinner table and outrages the stuffy guests, it now seems to shame him, not them. When Groucho Marx did that sort of thing with Margaret Dumont, he assumed no moral superiority: it was just an appeal to the fat-man-and-banana-peel anarchy in us. Berger is proclaiming a moral and ethical superiority that today seems dated and dumb. I couldn't wait for the cops to come and take him away. This response, or variants of it, recurred.

Still, in a film world where naturalism is taken as primal law, the fanciful leap of Hair provides some relief. Six years ago the English director David Greene made the same sort of leap with Godspell (TNR, May 12, 1973). In a more modest film, Greene had proportionately more success. (Coincidence: both films of American “youth” musicals were done by foreign-born directors.) But at least the makers of Hair have given us some high-spirited reminders of splendid things that film can do and, these days, isn't often asked to.