Flab Is Reality

By J.C.

As young people become more restive and their politics more violent, movies about them become more offensive condescending and dishonest. Some invidious ratio is at work here, witness the latest entry in the let's-make-money-off-the-kids sweepstakes, Stanley Kramer's R.P.M. The initials stand for "revolutions per minute" and a movie noteworthy for nastiness. Even The Strawberry Statement, MGM's pasteurized primer on revolution, looks by comparison like Mao's Little Red Book.

The stars of R.P.M. are Anthony Quinn, Ann-Margret and Gary Lockwood, which says a good deal right there. Quinn plays an aging sociologist known as Paco, a campus liberal who charms the kids and flusters the board of trustees by riding around on a motor scooter and shacking up with Grad Student Ann-Margret. When radical students, led by Lockwood, take over one of the administration buildings, they demand a new college president. 'Their first choice is Che Guevara," reports the dean to the boggled trustees. "Oh they know he's dead," he adds. "Their second choice is Eldridge Cleaver, and the third is--Paco Perez!" So Anthony Quinn becomes the new president of the college, but even he can't deal with the truculent campus radicals. Ann-Margret is giving him a hard time on the home front, too, cooking lousy dinners, casting aspersions on his sexual prowess, and tossing out little zingers about his advancing age like "Flab is reality." Paco finally calls in the cops--to beat the radicals out of the building, and thus loses face and Ann-Margret, not necessarily in that order.

Anthony Quinn, as usual, yells and mugs a lot. Gary Lockwood's hair is always neatly combed, and Ann-Margret has nice thighs. The script was written by Erich Segal, whose previous credits (The Games and the bestselling novel Love Story) make him the perfect scenarist for Stanley Kramer, one of Hollywood's most fatuous film makers. J.C.

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