Title : Hail (1972)
link : Hail (1972)
Hail (1972)
Toward the end of its scant running time, Hail resolves into a serviceable satire of Nixon-era political paranoia—but getting there requires slogging through lots of meandering and unfunny material. Produced and released before the Watergate scandal, Hail imagines a presidential administration fraught with intrigue because the commander-in-chief is a nutter who thinks all his subordinates are out to get him. The joke, of course, is that they are out to get him, hence the main storyline about a cabinet secretary (Richard B. Shull) drifting from closeness with the president (they served together in wartime) to participating in a conspiracy against him. The main subplot illustrates why the secretary loses faith—amid growing demonstrations by longhaired young people, the president adopts such fascistic policies as forming a nationwide police force under his command and imprisoning activists in concentration camps. Unfortunately, the film’s unsteady mixture of gloominess and humor means Hail is dark comedy at best, a tonal quagmire at worst.
While the picture is primarily of interest as a snapshot of political attitudes circa the early ‘70s (and as a cinematic obscurity given that it’s been out of circulation since a home-video release in the early ‘80s), there’s something almost nobly roughshod about Hail. It’s sloppy but it’s also scrappy. Hampered by an insufficient budget and a first-time director (this is Fred Levinson’s only movie), Hail is disorganized and sluggish. Scenes featuring officials either working with or scheming against the president are coherent in a blunt-instrument sort of way, which is to say the comic intentions come across even when jokes fail to land. Sequences depicting life among a hippies planning armed revolt lack the same clarity, since it’s unclear whether the film means to celebrate or lampoon the peace-and-love crowd. Not helping matters is a tendency toward overly broad performances. While Schull does well expressing his ambivalent character’s queasiness and Dick O’Neill is appropriately craven as an opportunistic attorney general, Dan Resin is wholly forgettable as the president, and Gary Sandy—years before WKRP in Cincinnati—borders on camp while playing a hippie who masquerades as a soldier. (Watch for Carol Kane in a tiny nonspeaking role.)
Still, even if the whole thing spins out of control with overheated allusions to Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar—it was the ‘70s, man—it’s possible to see how a stronger director could done more with the script by Phil Dusenberry and Larry Spiegel. Although Hail misses the mark, what it tries to do is interesting.
While the picture is primarily of interest as a snapshot of political attitudes circa the early ‘70s (and as a cinematic obscurity given that it’s been out of circulation since a home-video release in the early ‘80s), there’s something almost nobly roughshod about Hail. It’s sloppy but it’s also scrappy. Hampered by an insufficient budget and a first-time director (this is Fred Levinson’s only movie), Hail is disorganized and sluggish. Scenes featuring officials either working with or scheming against the president are coherent in a blunt-instrument sort of way, which is to say the comic intentions come across even when jokes fail to land. Sequences depicting life among a hippies planning armed revolt lack the same clarity, since it’s unclear whether the film means to celebrate or lampoon the peace-and-love crowd. Not helping matters is a tendency toward overly broad performances. While Schull does well expressing his ambivalent character’s queasiness and Dick O’Neill is appropriately craven as an opportunistic attorney general, Dan Resin is wholly forgettable as the president, and Gary Sandy—years before WKRP in Cincinnati—borders on camp while playing a hippie who masquerades as a soldier. (Watch for Carol Kane in a tiny nonspeaking role.)
Still, even if the whole thing spins out of control with overheated allusions to Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar—it was the ‘70s, man—it’s possible to see how a stronger director could done more with the script by Phil Dusenberry and Larry Spiegel. Although Hail misses the mark, what it tries to do is interesting.
Hail: FUNKY
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