SYNOPSIS: Director Jim McBride took his first step from the avant garde underground to Hollywood with this beautifully photographed bit of thoughtful science fiction. Glen and Randa are a couple in their early twenties who forage for survival after an unspecified apocalypse has wiped out civilization.  Drifting from one camp of survivors to another, Glen and Randa behave like arrested adolescents with limited knowledge of the world that existed before their birth, which now seems like folklore.  Glen has heard of the cities which existed many years ago and is convinced that they still exist.  When they encounter a self-styled traveling "magician" who demonstrates ancient home appliances and plays old Rolling Stones records for his tiny audiences, Glen asks him about "the city."  After the magician warns him that the cities are in ruins, Glen pilfers his collection of maps and Wonder Woman comics and sets out with a now-pregnant Randa to find Metropolis.  After months of traveling, Glen and Randa arrive at the seashore where they are befriended by Sidney Miller, an elderly man who gives them a place to stay and tells them tales of the world that once was.

EDITORIAL REVIEW:  What a completely strange film that was never a "cult classic" (nor ever will be) but rather popular for it's extensive nudity when they could have shot the nude scenes wearing clothes.  The two main actors' nude shots were not integral to the movie, not like András Jeles' 1984 film, The Annunciation.  At least in The Annunciation, it made sense that the actors were nude in the beginning as it was the beginning of life itself.  Although one can argue that Glen and Randa is the end of life, so it makes sense.  Uhm.  No.  Here, so it seems, it's just an excuse to see some nice looking bodies in the buff and was never properly though out.

The world, as we know it, came to an end about 60 years ago, but Glen and Randa, two innocents born after The Bomb came down, have apparently not spent all of their lives quite as naked as they are when the camera first discovers them picking berries in a woody glade—or doing whatever it is that innocents do in woody glades.  At least, Glen hasn't.  From his two tones of tan, it looks very much as if he's recently been wearing jeans.  This is not the major failure of Glen and Randa, or even a failure at all, only an indication of how one mind wandered during this end-of-the-world movie, which is as solemn and sincere as most newspaper editorials calling for an end to the arms race during the 1970's and 80's.

Glen and Randa which originally screened in 1971, was never actually about the arms race or even about the annihilation of civilization, which have provided lively material for everyone from George Pal and Stanley Kubrick to dozens of Japanese moviemakers.  Jim McBride, the director and co-author of the screenplay, is, instead, concerned with the nature of man, his curiosity, his impulse towards knowledge and his compulsion to impose his own order on the universe, which, as far as I can make out from the film (as well as from some remarks made by McBride in an interview), otherwise exists in some sort of moral harmony.  McBride, unfortunately, is a good deal more interesting as a moviemaker than as a philosopher, with the result that his movies have a tendency to look as if they mean a lot more than they really do.  His first film, David Holzman's Diary, was a tough and amusing put-on of cinéma vérité, about a man whose manic search for truth-on-film prompts him to photograph his own life, which ultimately leads to his complete alienation from it.  In Glen and Randa, Glen's search for the mysterious city, which he has seen pictured in an old Wonder Woman comic book, is not unlike David Holzman's search for truth.  It is both tragic and ironic, but it is dramatized in such simplistic terms that you notice things like suntans and the fact that Glen can read well enough to pronounce "Shazaam!" correctly though he has seemingly never heard of gasoline.

Glen also has a habit of philosophizing in a manner that might be called 20th-Century Cute.  When he and Randa find themselves sitting in an ancient car high in a tree (which I assume was a mere sapling when The Bomb went off), he is likely to say: "Maybe cars become trees the way leaves become butterflies." And everything, I should add, eventually becomes dust.

I rather like the way the film eschews dramatic climaxes, as if reflecting the barrenness of the emotional lives of Glen and Randa, but this leads to an awful monotony that neither the meaning of the film nor the performances can relieve.

Shelley Plimpton is dear and sweet and pale as Randa, who would prefer to settle into a nice, floor-through cave, instead of lurching off to find Metropolis.  Steven Curry's Glen looks like a former cast member of Hair (which Curry is). In his interpretation, however, innocence is pretty much equated with the mannerisms of an inexperienced actor.

Glen and Randa is neither a successful nor an entertaining movie, but it is sober, and what mind it has is high. Thus I'm completely mystified by the X rating that was attached to it in 1971, apparently because of its nudity and love-making.  They might be thought obscene only by stretching a censor's imagination. (with input from Vincent Canby of the NY Times in an article first published in 1971)

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STARRING: Steve Curry, Shelley Plimpton, Woody Chambliss, Garry Goodrow.
DIRECTOR: Jim McBride.
AVAILABILITY: In stock! Ships within one business day.
LENGTH: 93 minutes.
LANGUAGE: English.
SPECIAL FEATURES: 1.33:1 (4:3 Full Screen); Mono audio; 1 disc; Uncut.
VIEWER DISCRETION: Frequent to extensive nudity, sexual innuendo, sexual scenes, violence, coarse language.
PICTURE QUALITY: Very good to excellent picture quality. (what's this mean?)
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: USA (1971).
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DATE ADDED TO OUR LIBRARY:  January 9, 2009.
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