Favorite Movies: Hair

I’m a huge fan of musicals, including movie musicals (even though there are not that many really good ones). Normally my taste runs to thing like SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, WEST SIDE STORY and LOVE ME TONIGHT, but surprisingly one of my very favorites is the film version of HAIR.

I couldn’t have been more surprised when I first saw HAIR and came away enthralled by it. Sure, I always liked Galt MacDermot’s score, which is incredibly catchy, but HAIR was conceived as a “non-book” stage event, a “happening” for the theatre. I thought translating it to the screen was risky.

Fortunately, screenwriter Michael Weller and director Milos Forman didn’t try. They came up with a new story for the film which captured the spirit of the stage show but didn’t try to recreate it in a different medium. Weller’s screenplay does a great job of capturing the feeling of the era (as it was felt by a substantial segment of the population). Yes, his story is basically simple and stretches credibility in a few places, but so do most musicals. More importantly, Weller reveals a flair for musical writing – sketching in character by finding broad strokes that reveal character detail. Also, while his sympathies are clearly with the main hippie characters, he doesn’t make them perfect; they’re appealing but also irresponsible, rude and at times selfish.

Forman and choreographer Twyla Tharp (with invaluable help from cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek) give HAIR a stunning visual look. The “Aquarius” opener is one of the exciting musical numbers put on film (with that exhilarating 360-degree pan around Ren Woods, who is singing the hell out of the number, BTW), the title song is raucously memorable, the “White Boys”/”Black Boys” sequence delightful, “Where Do I Go” simple yet enormously effective and the finale chilling.

And the cast is a dream, with even the occasional non-actor demonstrating a voice that makes up for the lack of dramatic skill (e.g., Cheryl Barnes knocking “Easy to Be Hard” out of the ballpark).

Best of all, HAIR works as a FILM – recognizing that there are ways of telling parts of a story in visual terms that make it much more effective than trying to tell it in words.