THE REVOLUTIONARY (75)

Directed by: Paul Williams (1970)

Starring: Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, Seymour Cassel

The Pitch: A young college radical goes in a naive, well-meaning trajectory from distributing leaflets to assassinating public figures.

Theo Sez: Why is this excellent film so little-known? Perhaps because, with its quiet performances and greyish-brown colour scheme, it doesn't exactly give itself the hard sell ; perhaps because it's the kind of film you just know will have an open ending (and indeed it does) ; perhaps because its hero is (gasp!) an intellectual, albeit a terminally confused one. Voight is perfectly cast, his baby face and clean-cut earnestness encapsulating all the bourgeois college kids of the late 60s who started off arguing dialectics and ended up throwing Molotovs. His gauche sincerity is both funny and touching, a child's gawky idealism, just as the film both mocks and protects him - its best scenes place him in situations (an upper-crust dinner party, a meeting with a government official) where a lesser movie would have had him embarrassing himself (and us) : this one simply notes - with a mixture of pity and affection - how out of place he is, how unprepared for the real world. It's the kind of subtlety that makes the film feel perhaps a little modest - not a "major movie" - but in fact it's more memorable and distinctive than most high-profile movies. As someone tells our hero, "It's nice that people like you are around."