R.P.M.

A year after Gary Lockwood was slightly too old to play a hapless hippie about to go to Vietnam, cruising around L. A. with nothing to do but get stoned in MODEL SHOP, he played an even younger hippie and is completely miscast... especially since he's also balding... but this rebel at least has a cause...

Leader of a student group taking over a university's computer center, Lockwood... along with another thirty-something student Paul Winfield... have demands they give to a liberal professor they once really liked...

That's where star Anthony Quinn, hired as a kind of emergency dean/president, comes in: spending most of the picture either having long discussions with comparably stuffy and conservative university profs or hanging out with young girlfriend Ann-Margret, who, like Lockwood, has little to do here but spout smug counter-culture platitudes in what feels more like a progressive TV-movie than a watered-down big-screen expose of college revolutionaries (very timely here in 2024), hence the R. P. M. Title standing for Revolutions Per Minute...

But there's only one revolution here, and it drags, despite Lockwood having a few good monologues opening up to Quinn... yet the audience can never fully get into his shared plight/agenda since otherwise sympathetic left-wing director and scriptwriter Stanley Kramer and Erich Segal never properly flesh-out the characters to grow past clichés - on either side of the aisle.

R.P.M. is completely out-dated in today's Me, Myself, and I society. However, in the revolutionary times of the 1960s and early 1970s, R.P.M. was an excellent portrayal of the college "scene" of those times.

Anthony Quinn gives one of his finest "latter" years roles as F.W.J. "Paco" Perez. Quinn's character is a liberal fighting, social changing sociology professor who has earned the respect of the rebellious student population at his university. The students want changes now, but are unwilling to compromise. Stanley Kramer shows that there were "no easy" solutions to the various generational problems for the times. Ann-Margret is in her "sexiest" prime, but also shines as a Perez "grupie". Also, Gary Lockwood as the militant student leader gives a creditable performance.

Revolutions Per Minute is a great trip down memory lane and helps capture the atmosphere of 1970.

This film is relevant because nothing did change between the film's release date in 1970 and the two generations which have followed.

In a conversation on the stairwell toward the end of the film, Anthony Quinn and Gary Lockwood discuss change, indicating that nothing happened between Quinn's and Lockwood's respective generations. Nothing has happened in the two generations that followed, i.e. 1990 and 2010.

The sad fact is that society has degenerated. I graduated from a very liberal Big Ten school in 1962 and we didn't have campus unrest. After that, I began a successful career which was interrupted by the draft and a tour in Vietnam. I returned to work and became even more successful because I worked smart and hard. The draft saved me and I wish the draft would have never ended, although I think the Vietnam war was futile. Young men need military service to GROW UP! As for Ann Margaret, she always played sexy but never nude, except for her role in 'Carnal Knowledge' where viewers experienced her large arse.

Despite Ann's frivolous on-screen characters (I wonder how she was in private life) this was a film that predicts the future, as in...'Oh yah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.' (John Mellancamp).

R.P.M. the abbreviation of Revolutions Per Minute is Stanley Kramer's attempt to get inside the head of the student movement of the late Sixties. It probably got a bit of box office coming out as it did in the year of the four students shot down by the National Guard at Kent State. But in the intervening years it really hasn't worn well.

Anthony Quinn is a popular sociology professor of Hispanic heritage and has something of a following among the radical left on campus. When President John Zaremba just resigns in frustration because he can't deal with a bunch of students occupying the campus administration building. Quinn also has a student mistress in the person of Ann-Margret a rather open secret on campus.

The Board of Trustees decide on what they consider a master stroke, make the popular Quinn the new president because they think he can talk the radical talk and make them walk. It doesn't quite work out that way as Quinn all too well realizes that he's now part of the 'establishment'.

The students who are all too old to be playing campus radicals include spokesperson Gary Lockwood and black student leader Paul Winfield. Fine players but all showing their age. Ann-Margret is a graduate student, but even she looks a bit old to be college coed.

It ends in a scene that was all too familiar in the Sixties, police raiding the school and making arrests. At some point the students have to get back to the business of education.

Fascinating that the big threat they had was to destroy the giant computer that the college had if they didn't get their way. Now Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs would have a fainting spell dare they suggest such a thing.

R.P.M. marked the beginning of when director Stanley Kramer started to lose his muse. It is truly truly dated.

As Shirley MacLaine says in Rumor Has It, "Everyone needs someone in their life to let them know when youth has come to an end." For Anthony Quinn, that someone was Stanley Kramer, a director whom I normally love. Fresh off their success of The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Kramer cast Quinn as a middle-aged professor in R. P. M., standing for "Revolutions Per Minute". Quinn plays the "cool" professor who beds his students, rides a motorcycle, and talks with modern slang. When a group of protesting hippies take over the administration building and give "demands" as they hold the college's computer system hostage, an emergency board meeting is called and Quinn is sent as a mediator since the kids like him.

But here's the insulting part of the film, why dear vibrant, sexy Tony should never have taken the part: he's shown as over-the-hill and unable to relate to the wild generation. He wears reading glasses, he takes terrible insults from the students, and his girlfriend tells him "Pull in your gut" when he walks around naked. (Sorry ladies, he's given a flesh-colored thong to protect his modesty.) One could argue that he's still young and hip enough to go to bed with Ann-Margret, but as the movie progresses, the students are so disrespectful, they show the real generation gap: manners and decency. Even though Tony doesn't agree with the kids, he still tries to treat them with respect, but the angry, protesting teenagers don't give him the same courtesy.

There will be a large chunk of audience members who side with the teenagers, and that makes me both sad and disgusted. Manners never go out of style, and using them doesn't show weakness or inflexibility. It shows class, the ability to see the bigger picture, and maturity. Tony may belong to the older generation with graying hair and a growing tummy, but I'll happily join him any day of the week.