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 we are traveling back to 1969 to the now legendary indie film Medium Cool. Haskell Wexler made this cinema-verite style movie about a TV news cameraman who has been moved by the political movements of the 1960s. He used to report on car accidents and during the political upheaval at the time he realizes that his reporting might not be helping anyone. He feels like he just reports on a car accident and walks away from the victims. So he decides to pivot to being a freelance journalist with a mission of his own after he finds out the station that he has been working for has been giving his footage to the police to persecute protesters. Fed up, he goes off on his own! From D.C. to the protests at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, he interviews people about the revolutions at hand until he gets a little too mixed up in his subjects.
A single mom and her son who moved from West Virginia to Chicago get very close to our leading man. When he asks where the boy's father is, he's told he went to Vietnam. He later learns that the man just bounced and never came back. The single mom later tracks the cameraman down at the DNC protests to tell him that her son is missing. Sadly, our leading man drives her to figure out where the boy is - unaware that the boy has returned back home - and they get into a horrible car accident. The news reports on the accident and moves on, a nod to what our leading man used to do before he was swept up in the revolution. It's a powerful movie, made even more powerful by the style in which it is made (plus some music by Love and The Mothers of Invention), and it is absolutely essential to get a feel for this chaotic moment in time.
If you live in Chicago or you love history, this movie would be of special interest to you as it explores all of the ways that the city has changed and just how powerful Chicago was in the 60s. Chicago was a fascinating landscape from the hippie students at the University of Chicago to the Black Panther party gaining momentum with Fred Hampton and even Appalachian settlers who came to Chicago in search of work and settled in Uptown (if you are familiar with that area, Carol's Country Western Bar is a final remnant from Chicago's hillbilly past). The cameraman talks to all of these different kinds of people, plus politicians and other folks, to figure out what is really going on in politics and culture at the time. This is one of the most of-its-time movies that manages to accurately portray what confusion and upheaval that the sixties were really about. It wasn't all peace, love, drugs, and sex! But now that I mention it, there is some sexiness in the movie, too!
Mariana Hill added some much-needed sexual relief in the movie. She is totally naked from boobs to bush as she single-handedly seems to lead the sexual revolution in her apartment. About thirty-two minutes into the movie, she teases her lover in bed. She calls him names when he wants to leave, telling him that he is a "selfish cameraman". He retaliates by tickling her to easily break the tension. They have a rather long scene where they lay around in bed
Mariana Hill did a couple more nude scenes after this, becoming somewhat of a sexpot in the 1970s whenever she showed her bush. Still, she was probably her freest and foxiest in this movie as the cameraman's girlfriend who seems to spend all of her time lounging naked in bed.
Medium Cool has been widely praised since its release, with its respect only growing in time. While the movie touched on subjects that other mainstream films at the time were starting to grapple with, Medium Cool was given an X rating. Haskell Wexler said: "What no one had the nerve to say was that it was a political X." Damn! In 1970, the movie was changed to an R rating. While the original rating may have been mostly due to politics, let's not forget the hot nude scene:
