No Hippies Were Used In Making This Film

Rating: 9/10 (27 January 2011)

This is a terrific movie, and with all the reviews of the plot already present here, I won't go into the storyline. But it is a little disheartening to see how many reviewers mention Donald Sutherland's topnotch performance as being a hippie from the '60s and therefore a strange -- though funny -- anachronism. This is simply wrong.
Sutherland's Oddball is not a hippie, but a hipster, and neither the language he uses (such words and phrases as "like", "baby", "dig" and "negative waves") nor the personality of his character, are the least bit anachronistic. The hipster subculture that existed in the 1940s spoke in a slang they called jive, and every word and phrase uttered by the character of Oddball is entirely consistent with the way hipsters talked and behaved. That apparently so few modern viewers realize this, and think a phrase such as "digging some wine and cheese" could not have been uttered before 1964, is really quite sad. Believing that the movie would include such a glaring and silly anachronism as a '60s era hippie in 1944 WW-II cheapens the movie, and betrays a rather woeful ignorance of American cultural history. To believe that an actual hippie would become a tank commander is another glaring historical misinterpretation; no true hippie would ever have been involved in anything like that. The whole idea that Oddball is supposed to be a hippie is a monumentally muddled notion, and it's difficult to believe that anyone could be that deeply confused about the past seventy years of American history.
The movie is far too well-made and well-written to contain anything as preposterous as a '60s hippie character commanding a Sherman tank in WW-II France. If you've never seen it, watch it, enjoy it, and understand that guys really, honestly, truly did exist in 1944 who said "baby" and "dig" and talked about "negative waves". If you've seen the movie and thought that nobody ever said those things or smoked reefer until the 1960s, please do yourself a favor: go to a library and read some books on American culture, especially from the 1920s through the 1940s. There has been a long, interconnected line of anti-authoritarian, drug-using, jive-talking, free-love-believing subcultures, and the story doesn't begin in 1964, or in 1952 with the Beats. The roots go back much farther than that, and in the 1940s that subculture belonged to the hipsters. Donald Sutherland plays the part perfectly.