praesagitio

This is a sympathetic portrait of the Black Bear commune, and you'll come away thinking that the founding members were incredibly lucky--not so much for living the free love communal lifestyle as for not being injured in the mix of idealistic self-absorption and do-it-yourself medical treatments (including midwifery) that characterized life there.

It's clear from the affection with which the founding members talk of each other that it was overall a great time for them, and there's obviously a strong bond that unites them still. Some left the commune to form nuclear families, get jobs, and educate their children.

What's frightening, though, is the stunning level of self-absorption that makes a few of the members fail to think at all about how these principles affected their children. "We were like our own tribe," recalls one boy (Aaron Marley), who ran through the trails and woods with the other kids and later got a crew cut to rebel. I guess there are no snakes or poison oak in the California woods. He later is handed off to a foster family in the commune when his mother went off to paint and find herself; when he wanted to live with a Native American woman nearby, his mother came back, called on his father (who was elsewhere), made a big stink, and got him back on the commune--though not, apparently, with her. So much for the "children have choices" idea.

In another story, though, a child is given a choice, and it's scary. Tesilya's story is the most frightening, and it's a good thing that she tells it so that the audience can see that she's alive and thriving as an editor today. The Shiva Lila cult, which supposedly "worships children," comes to the commune and starts to take it over. When the commune members drive them away, Tesilya is asked to choose and decides to go with her mother. She's FIVE! What would you do? As the cult wanders to the Philippines and India, working all the time on its stated mission of breaking parental bonds, her mother drifts away at some point and Tesilya's left with a bunch of other children, many of whom die of diphtheria (freedom from DPT shots must have been part of the freedoms of the commune). Eventually the cult makes its way to Oregon, and by chance she meets up with some of the Black Bear commune people, who welcome her with "We have been waiting for you. Where have you been?" Uh, she's maybe 10 at this point? (The film doesn't say.) "Glad to have you join us, or whatever." She obviously gets an education somehow, but as Aaron, the boy who later becomes a biochemist, says, "We (children) were pretty much lab rats for the adults" and their ideals.

One of the former cult members is quoted as saying something like "Wanting to save the world can be a huge ego trip." This film presents it all--the love and the self-absorption and the ego-tripping--and lets you make up your own mind.

The dialog is much sharper than you'd think; it's genuinely funny. Of course, some of it may be funny only in context: when one character asks what another would say, the Stuart Erwin character replies, "Peanuts, almonds, walnuts. . . "--getting around the prohibition about saying "Nuts!" while letting the audience in on the joke. Stuart Erwin is all right as the Average Joe, and although something's clearly lost for modern audiences in watching Rochelle Hudson's facial expressions (like Botox before Botox existed), the secondary characters are good. Pert Kelton ramps up her tough-talking sidekick schtick to become a tough-talking antagonist who'd be a perfect candidate for the matrimonial bureau except that one of the qualifications is that the ideal girl hasn't been touched by human hands. "You've got me there," she cracks. Watch for Berton Churchill's posing for a picture as a crime-fighting (all right, bumbling) district attorney; his expressions are priceless.