Glen and Randa

...but unique by it's own right.

I had heard of this movie years ago, but always had an interest in watching it. It wasn't until about 15 years ago when I bought a VHS tape of it. What I saw was quite different and very unique for the time it was released, in 1971. I had read long ago that it was about a couple of teenagers surviving a nuclear holocaust and after several years, go on a quest to find the fictional Metropolis of Superman fame.

Here's where I was wrong. The couple come across some characters along their way, which kind of muddled up my thoughts of what I read. I wanted to research it, but by the time I wanted to, my ex-wifer threw it out in a yard sale.

My quest goes on to find it again...but it still very different and quite unique.

I find it interesting that nobody has yet mentioned how much casual nudity there is in this film. It's what got the film its "X" rating, even though there's no overt sexuality connected to it. It's more of a device to underline the innocence of Glen and Randa and their nomadic life. Nothing in the film would get it more than an "R" today. There are no special effects as such, just vistas of nature and of the ruined technology from which the survivors glean their living. The young actors are very appealing, and there's a quiet inevitability to the story's unfolding. I wish this were available on DVD, but given that there's no studio money behind it, this is unfortunately unlikely. This little film has stayed with me for many years since the release. It's too bad so few people know about it; it deserved a better fate.

Bizarrely, GLEN & RANDA was shown on late night TV here in the UK, so I decided to give it a watch having never heard of it before. I'm not exactly sure what I watched; ostensibly this is a post-apocalyptic movie dealing with mankind's struggle to adapt in a ruined world, but it's also an incredibly slow moving film in which very little incident actually happens.

The film begins with a couple of naked hippies strolling around and moves on from there. The female character falls pregnant and this sub-plot takes up a lot of screen time. The performances, shall we say, naturalistic to say the least, and there's a lot of waffle and philosophical debate as the characters interact with others in their landscape. I did like the way the central twosome are searching for a mystical comic book city and the cinematography is quite good on a zero budget, but there's too little meat here to sustain a proper movie.

Glen and Randa is raw and has a hedonistic feel to it. The film was originally released in 1970 with an X rating because of (gasp!) full frontal male nudity! Don't want people to see that male genitalia.

The film has a sort of low key, low budget amateurish feel to it at times. There are a few scenes which are sort of strange and silly at the same time. If it had been played serious by all the actors it could have felt sort of sleazy but most of the time it has a slight camp feel to it.

The film also has an innocence to it that makes it feel very refreshing. Glen and Randa like to frolic in the nude at times and after exposed to a traveling entertainer they decide to leave their group and travel on their own and find "metropolis", a city with people dressed all in white but find that much isn't left after the holocaust.

One other element I enjoyed was that there aren't any crazy people out to kill, rape or mame. You don't have to really worry about what will happen to these two as they travel alone.

There are moments that seem very dated and some of the scenes aren't shot that well. It's not a film that makes a huge impact but it does linger in your head a bit afterward mainly because of the youth of the lead characters.

One thing's for sure about this movie - you won't think of The Rolling Stones' "Time is on My Side" the same way again, following a scene where the few remnants of society in a post-apocalyptic wasteland - we don't see the apocalypse, it just happened - are sitting around at night and there is this strange curiosity called a record player that somehow, despite electricity and power being something of a rarity, can play a record. They have a single of the Stones song, and it sometimes goes a little in and out of track, warbling a bit, and everyone just sits around listening to it. Impassive, just taking it in. What is this thing called 'Music' after all?

It's one of those oddball moments, which is funnier perhaps on paper than how it's played, that comes out of Jim McBride's film of Glen and Randa. Watching this film you get the impression that it's almost like a bizarre, wild-child style documentary on what would happen to people years and years down the line after society had been broken apart with no infrastructure to set it up. Oh, and there's sex between these two crazy kids and lo and behold Randa becomes pregnant. So that becomes an issue as the two of them go wandering around, trying to find food, shelter, and some place they can call home.

McBride's film is a true oddity, shot in grainy film and done to look like some sort of artifact of a time and place (maybe intentional, maybe not), and the two leads are non-professionals. You know, for example, when Steven Curry is shouting out the same 'TIME IS ON MY SIDE' over and over, as it's in his head, this is a performance that is stripped down to its essentials. It's either a very good performance or a bad performance it that makes sense, but this guy is always in it, always showing this crazy kid's curiosity about the world, about the "City" that could be out there - he learns this through his tattered comic book remains he carries with him - and Shelley Plimpton is the same way.

As with the McCarthy book The Road we don't get many other people here. There is the tribe early on, but Glen and Randa can't stay there as it's too unstable and Glen wants bigger and brighter things. The last "act" as it were of this gangly narrative takes them to a beach where Randa may finally deliver her child into the world. The ending itself is as bizarre as anything else in the film, but less logical. Why does Glenn do what he does, or Randa, or the baby, or the old man who has another few remnants to help them? In some ways the movie has not stood the test of time, but in a way it has.

It's longish-freaky-looking characters are out of the late 60's, victims of the Flower Power movement, but they're also real and tactile and are fascinating to watch just from an anthropological point of view. In other words, it's not like a Mad Max post-apoc future, there are no motorcycle gangs or the like, it's, again, stripped down to where nature has taken over the Earth in major ways. If anything it's low-budget-ness shows a little too much, but the script via Rudy ("Two Lane Blacktop" Wurlitzer makes this experimental and low-key in good ways. What they don't got, they make it an advantage.

Simply put: one of the stranger films of 1971.