The American Way (1986)

Set in America but filmed over here, this three-year-old oddity had a release in the States in a mercifully truncated form retitled Riders of the Storm. It may well be the last 1968 movie, with Dennis Hopper, Michael J. Pollard and others still tripping as a renegade air force propaganda unit still flying their WW II bomber over the nation beaming out a pirate TV station which pollutes the airwaves with anarchic meanderings. (When a publicity company decides to push a right-wing female hawk, Wilma Westinghouse, as a presidential candidate, Hopper realises she intends to send 'our boys' into action in Central America and vows that it's time to get rid of her. There are lots of echoes here, with some bomb-riding from Dr Strangelove, some politico-satirising from Nashville, some counterculture rambling from every film Dennis Hopper has made since he dropped acid, and a full dose of incoherence from such barely released post-hippie dogs as Mr Freedom, Slapstick of Another Kind and Out. The problem is that the old targets are pretty battered these days, and the film doesn't really have anything add to the list of complaints against Reagan-Thatcher politicos, TV evangelists, militarist idiots, armageddon-prompting nukeheads and Tammy Wynette. The American Way is a shambolic, annoying mess that at least has its heart in the right place, ie: Woodstock. But it seems fundamentally dishonest for this bunch of unreconstructed hippies to indict the villains of the '60s for a world situation that has actually been created by sell-outs like Jerry Rubin and Richard Branson rather than the old bogies of the still-stoned left.

First published in: City Limits (issue unknown)

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