The Love-Ins

During the late 1960s, Hollywood tried to cash in on the hippie drug craze going on in much of the United States. And, in most cases, they produced films with dubious messages and often starring down-and-out stars who were essentially slumming it for a paycheck (such as Lana Turner and Jennifer Jones).

When the story begins, a group of students are being expelled from a university for producing an underground newspaper. One of the professors, the 'cool' Dr. Jonathan Barnett (Richard Todd) quits in sympathy over the overreaction of the school and soon he finds himself a minor celebrity...adored by the hippies. After appearing on "The Joe Pyne Show" (sort of like "The Morton Downey Jr Show"), he moves to San Francisco and he moves in to a flat occupied by 147 people and some of his old students.

At first, he's more an observer of the Haight-Ashbury scene, but soon (too soon really) he's a cult leader...wearing white robes and with students sitting at his feet and waiting for him to dispense knowledge...which is mostly about liberation and LSD use. To say he has delusions of godhood is pretty much on point. After one of these old student (Susan Oliver) has a bad Acid trip, the other student (James MacArthur) becomes very suddenly jaded and realizes that Barnett and the drugs are awful. This change, like the change in Barnett, is way too fast to be realistic. So what's next for these folks? Tune in and see....or not.

There are quite a few problems with this film, even if it is an interesting window into a certain subculture of the late 60s (led by Professor Timothy Leary). First, many of Barnett's teen and early 20s disciples are quite old and very square (such as Mark Goddard (31), James MacArthur (30) and Susan Oliver (35))....and becausse of this, they are ridiculous and come off as phonies. Second, the music in the film is pretty awful....or at least much of it. Several times, it seems as if a dozen folks with no musical abilities just started performing their own personal song! Third, and most importantly, the film is chock full of one-dimensional characters. There is no middle ground between the ultra-squares and the hippies most of the film. And, folks go from loving Barnett to hating him almost instantly!

What I did appreciate about the film was how it unknowingly actually predicted the dark side of this 'Summer of Love'.....showing the dark side of the hippie movement. However, it also wasn't exactly subtle nor realistic....and seemed to say that hippies were bad...which is a gross over-generalization.

Overall, the film is interesting from a cultural sense but also imbalanced and phony as well. Please don't, like my daughter, assume all the late 60s was like THIS! Some of this is quite realistic....and much of it isn't.

If Jack Webb were to write/direct an "expose" of Timothy Leary and the LSD/Hippie movement, what would it look like? The 1967 film 'The Love Ins' doesn't share any of the same credited writers or directors with the 1950s and 60s TV series Dragnet.

Still, the one dimensional, stereotypical characters: hypocritical, "square" parents clashing with reckless, self-absorbed young adults, intolerant jocks, a greedy promoter and a cult leader with a messiah complex combined with the "it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt" plot line (and subplots), will have you flashing back to the classic TV series.

That said, this film does have some historic, and even artistic, value as it retells the age old tale of an idealistic movement falling prey to pride and corruption.

Richard Todd was a notable acting figure in the British film industry for roughly 15 years. He was Oscar-nominated for his first major role and then had a starring role in an Alfred Hitchcock film. From then on he was a reliable acting presence in array of action and war films giving convincing performances.

But his acting persona and style had fallen out of favour by the mid-1960s as kitchen-sink dramas and 'Swinging London' type films became popular. The drying up of roles perhaps disorientated him as that's the only way one can explain his appearance in the American film 'The Love-Ins'.

The film is a cheap and tedious take on the counter-culture sweeping America at the time. What is surprising is for an exploitation picture, apart from an 'Alice In Wonderland' LSD sequence, it's not even entertaining as camp.

But the film's most dispiriting aspect is Todd's performance. In the central role of playing a supposedly Timothy Leary-like figure that captures the hearts and minds of San Francisco youth, Todd is totally unconvincing and displays none of the charisma or personality such a role required. His inability to even attempt to adjust his usual acting style just underlines how miscast he is.

In a career with many quality films and performances, this is a sad career low.

This is sort of worth it for the last fifteen minutes, but otherwise it's a pretty awful waste of our time and their efforts - such as they are. James MacArthur and Patricia Oliver are being disciplined by their university for the school rag publishing material just a bit to close to the bone for the principal. In protest, Richard Todd ("Dr. Barnett") quits and is soon a spokesman for their free love style existence. Initially, he holds to his liberté, égalité, fraternité existence but the adulation and success, as well as a little romantic attention from his erstwhile student gradually corrupts his soul and soon someone is heading for a fall. It's really only at the end of this film, that we get anywhere near a point to it all. The proof that absolute power (or a variation thereof, in this case) corrupts absolutely - even those with the most benign intentions. Todd is hopeless, however - he really is a fish out fo water; MacArthur and Oliver are just too preppy and cute to evoke any sort of passion for what they are trying to achieve - indeed the whole "niceness" of the first flower-power, anti-establishment 75 minutes is quite hard to sit through. The censors rejected it... I can't think why?

An obvious cash-in on Timothy Leary and his "turn on, drop out" LSD preachings of the 60's. Of course, this being corporate Hollywood, they turn the Timothy Leary character (well played by Richard Todd) into a money hungry CULT leader "who must be stopped!" Amusing for today's self-appointed "hip" audiences by its dated hippie iconography and the fact that the evil head hippie is played the TV series LOST IN SPACE's Goddard!