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Turner Classic Movies, Sunday, April 21, 1 a.m.
While the musical Hair is a beloved classic, there is an unspoken problem with the staged version. It doesn’t really have much of a plot. The movie, on the other hand, which was directed by the great Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt), has a screenplay by Michael Weller that turns the tone poem about hippiedom and revolution into a powerfully resonant story about love, death, honor and protest.
In the late 1960s, Claude (John Savage) is a farm boy draftee who arrives in New York for his Army physical and he falls in with a group of hippies that includes the charismatic Berger (Treat Williams), who introduces Claude to a debutante (Beverly D’Angelo).
The songs (like “Age of Aquarius,” “Let the Sunshine In,” and “Easy to be Hard”) are all wonderfully, lovingly staged and the film is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
