Welcome to my new short series called Hippie Hotties where I plan to talk about a hippie-era movie that stretched the limits of free love and sex by showing off some sexy nudes on the big screen. This era of experimentation led to some pretty far-out films, so let's take a look!
Back in February, we talked about the iconic hippie movie The Trip which starred Susan Strasberg nude in a trippy scene. I promised you all that we would return to Susan Strasberg's other fascinating hippie nude scene. Well, here we are! Let's talk about famous acting daughter Susan Strasberg and her tits-out scene in the lesser-known 1968 hippie thriller Psych-Out.
Susan Strasberg, as we mentioned previously, was the daughter of famous acting teacher Lee Strasberg. This wasn't her only counterculture film! The established actress in her 30s had previously gone nude in The Trip in a bit role, but she wound up taking the lead in this movie and briefly baring her boobs once more. I hope she made her papa proud with her realistic portrayal of Jenny, a deaf woman to runs away to Haight-Ashbury in order to find her missing hippie brother. Her brother is known as a sculptor called The Seeker. That sounds pretty far out, man. One of the band members says he's heard of The Seeker, a wayward hippie preacher artist, and he thinks that they can find his whereabouts. That's great! Movie over! Well, no. Jenny gets distracted while trying to find her brother by falling in love with members of a psychedelic band called Mumblin' Jim - ya know, as you do. The film stars a young Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern, both hippie actors who seem to show up in everything at that time as they make up fake band members. Susan really takes on The police wind up looking for her (huh?) and so the band members hide her in their Victorian crash pad filled with loving hippie couples and colorful decor. She has a sexual relationship with one of the bandmates but does not know anything about his reputation as a player and a heartbreaker. This obviously does not wind up well!
The Seeker goes to a concert where Jenny is, but Jenny is too distracted by her heartbreak from the player. She takes some drugs that have been slipped into fruit juice but takes way too much of it. Not she is tripping as she rides a streetcar throughout the city and is chased by people who are after her. When she gets back to the house she is staying in, she finds that there was a fire. The fire consumes everything she has come to know and love in San Francisco, so riddled with grief and hallucinogens she jumps into a reservoir. She then winds up in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge where two of her hippie band friends come to rescue her. One of them gives in front of an oncoming car to save Jenny, but he gets hit. When he's dying he says that he hopes that this will also be a good trip. Aaaaaaand scene. That's the film! Intense ride, right? I hope you weren't tripping when you were watching that ending because that's kind of a bummer.
Oddly enough, Dick Clark produced this film because he wanted to make a movie that would reach the kids and warn them about the dangers of drugs. He wrote in his 1976 memoir that he had seen kids in the hippie communes living in awful conditions and that this film is a true testament to the kinds of things that he saw back then. It's pretty clear with that tragic ending that this film was not made by well-intentioned hippies, but by people trying to warn the youth of Haight-Ashbury.
The movie was originally called The Love Children, but distributors thought that audiences would confuse the subject matter of the film for being about bastard children instead of hippies. Common mistake? Regardless, the movie Psycho was being reissued and released in theaters around the country again, so they titled the film Psych-Out to play off of that classic film's success. The movies have absolutely nothing to do with one another, but it's a clever marketing ploy. Did it work? Not really! That being said, the soundtrack did rock and contained music from a little-known San Fernando Valley band called Storybook as well as music from Strawberry Alarm Clock who famously gave us the hippie anthem "Incense and Peppermint".
While the movie has a lack of good nudity or positive hippie portrayals, I will give it to Dick Clark that it does feel like it is giving us a peek behind some kind of curtain. That being said, when compared to other movies that were filmed in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, it does have an aesthetic look that seems true to the time, but the movie's vibes are off (to put it in hippie speak). If you want to get a real Haight feel then this movie might deliver that up until the end. At the very least Susan's breasts are real and all-natural!
