The cinematography is artistic, with seascapes and vistas of the beach at Fire Island that are relaxing to the eye -- a pleasure to watch. Some of the acting is passable, overcoming the cliché-ridden, preachily didactic script.
The three protagonists are young and attractive, rich and privileged. They also are homophobic, racist, classist and "lookist", even the female member of the trio, played in space cadet style by Barbara Hershey. Their victims, a not-so-pretty teenager and a Hispanic man, are wholly innocent and impliedly entitled to special protections. The homophobic aspect is quite bizarre in that there is a definite homosexual undertone to a relationship of two young men latching on to one girl.
As the politically committed sixties gave way to the seventies "Me" generation it was inevitable that Frank and Eleanor Perry's left-wing films would go quickly and permanently out of fashion. Eleanor Perry, a former campus bolshevik some fifteen years older than her husband, later penned a bitter account of their partnership and breakup, which no one by then cared to read.
If you like propaganda, laid on with a trowel, this picture is for you.
The three protagonists are young and attractive, rich and privileged. They also are homophobic, racist, classist and "lookist", even the female member of the trio, played in space cadet style by Barbara Hershey. Their victims, a not-so-pretty teenager and a Hispanic man, are wholly innocent and impliedly entitled to special protections. The homophobic aspect is quite bizarre in that there is a definite homosexual undertone to a relationship of two young men latching on to one girl.
As the politically committed sixties gave way to the seventies "Me" generation it was inevitable that Frank and Eleanor Perry's left-wing films would go quickly and permanently out of fashion. Eleanor Perry, a former campus bolshevik some fifteen years older than her husband, later penned a bitter account of their partnership and breakup, which no one by then cared to read.
If you like propaganda, laid on with a trowel, this picture is for you.