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!
Today's Hippie Hottie is focusing on a good girl gone a little bad, Ann-Margret. The one and only! Ann-Margret has had a fabulous career and there is no doubt about that. Let's take a look at Stanley Kramer's little-known 1970 film R.P.M. which stands for Revolutions Per Minute, in reference to the student revolutions of the 60s.
This movie is set in the middle of the turbulent 1960s in which a couple of student radicals and activists take over a university's administration building and they have a list of 12 demands for the school to meet. Since the school does not want to meet the students' demands, they come up with another solution. The board decides to put Professor "Paco" Perez in charge since he is a radical himself and is closely related to some of the students. They think that this will obviously help everyone, but this liberal arts professor played by Anthony Quinn finds that it's actually incredibly difficult to make all of these people happy. Go figure! One of the students that he is, ehem, "close to" is his student girlfriend Rhoda who is played by the one and only Ann-Margret.
Ann-Margret is PEAK sexy in this movie. She has always been sexy, but in this movie she takes her clothes off and shows a breast with her back to the camera. Interestingly, this is only a year before Ann's BEST nude scene in the adorably hippie-influenced movie Carnal Knowledge.
She did show her breasts in the 1960s, in the 1967 film Tiger and the Pussycat where her breast was seen at a far distance as she changed. But Ann-Margret was a playful sex kitten throughout the 60s and 70s. From body-painted scenes in 1966's The Swinger to her pantyhose dance scene in Viva Las Vegas - hell, she was out-shaking Elvis in that movie!
R.P.M. does not end very "cool". He can't make the students happy and the professor ultimately turns his back on them. He orders the activists to be evacuated and his own girlfriend gets arrested. He walks through a crowd of students and gets booed. THE END. The end?! What a square. That could be why the movie is not fondly remembered or critically acclaimed. It currently has a 36% on Rotten Tomatoes. That's not exactly a "critical darling".
So here's the thing though: this movie does need some context to even try to understand. That being said, even with context it is not great. In fact, it might even be more uncool when you get it. At the time this movie was made, there were A LOT of student activists attempting to take over and overthrow their campus governments in an effort to make universities more liberal and fair to students. A number of schools had massive riots, many of them ending in violence. Director Stanley Kramer was attempting to give some humanity to the school administrators who were seen at this time as being unreasonable overlords by these students. What happens next is kind of ridiculous. He suggests that there is essentially nothing that can be done or changed at the top and that the administrators are just doing their job. That's an okay outlook if there was even an ounce of compromise or an actual critique about academia as a whole...but there's not. It's just a weird movie that tries to take a stab at the social commentary of its time by showing clunkily showing "both sides" of the issue, but it totally misses the mark which makes it feel even more uncool.
Luckily, Stanley Kramer later figured out that this movie wasn't great. He wound up saying that this is his least favorite film that he directed. Hey, that happens. We can't fault the movie entirely, however. It did give us this great view of Ann-Margret undressing:
