Dealing: Or The Berkeley-To-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues

1971's DEALING: OR THE BERKELEY-TO-BOSTON FORTY-BRICK LOST-BAG BLUES is nothing if not patently unpredictable.  I grew quite restless with it several times, but was pushed along by the sheer wonder of what would happen next, what direction it would take.  There is much gear shifting.  It begins as an aimless look at leftover counter culturalism, then becomes a thriller of sorts, then concludes as an action film.  I'll admit I was as much baffled by the tone as I was the overall screenplay by David Odell and director Paul Williams.  I think it's another case of my being born too late.

Michael and Douglas Crichton penned (under the pseudonym "Michael Douglas") the novel upon which the movie is based.  I can't speak for it but I'll guess it made a lot of points about hippie culture, academia, capitalism.  The film does that with fleeting moments of success, but overall the damned thing is just so ponderous.  Especially those early scenes.

Peter (Robert F. Lyons, average) is a law school student at Harvard who can't be bothered taking his exams.  He's not all that interested in his girlfriend either.  But he likes doing jobs for John (John Lithgow, very good), an enterprising fellow student who has a side business selling drugs.  Namely marijuana but also some bricks of heroin.  Peter acts as courier to Berkeley and meets the free spirited Susan (Barbara Hershey, gorgeous).  He is smitten.  Later, back in Boston, he begs John to let her run some dope back over.  Unfortunately, she loses it along the way.

The story then gets a bit serpentine, what with a corrupt cop (Charles Durning, good but sporting a "WTF am I doing in this movie?"  visage most of the time) and mobsters getting involved.  John, originally portrayed as mildly cunning and in control, degenerates into meekness.  Peter picks up the reigns to rescue his new girlfriend, the one he made it with in a recording studio back in California after only knowing her for a few hours.  Far out.

Those early scenes to which I referred will be a real test for anyone under the age of, oh, sixty-five.  Those who remember the period depicted.  Director Williams does create a truly time locked aesthetic, with lengthy scenes of college students and others just barely hanging out.  Having empty conversations and not giving a shit about their lives of privilege. Just acting, oddly.  Some of it plays very amatuerishly.  Almost like filmed rehearsals.   I'm sure these moments are accurate, reflective of time and place, and there are good movies of this type, but DEALING really isn't one of them.

But it is unique.  Very uneven, of course.  The later scenes certainly pick up the pace and while lively don't really involve you in the characters' plight any moreso than before.  Ed Brown's cinematography is very attractive.