Glen and Randa (1971)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

One thing's for sure about this movie - you won't think of The Rolling Stones' "Time is on My Side" the same way again, following a scene where the few remnants of society in a post-apocalyptic wasteland - we don't see the apocalypse, it just happened - are sitting around at night and there is this strange curiosity called a record player that somehow, despite electricity and power being something of a rarity, can play a record. They have a single of the Stones song, and it sometimes goes a little in and out of track, warbling a bit, and everyone just sits around listening to it. Impassive, just taking it in. What is this thing called 'Music' after all?It's one of those oddball moments, which is funnier perhaps on paper than how it's played, that comes out of Jim McBride's film of Glen and Randa. Watching this film you get the impression that it's almost like a bizarre, wild-child style documentary on what would happen to people years and years down the line after society had been broken apart with no infrastructure to set it up. Oh, and there's sex between these two crazy kids and lo and behold Randa becomes pregnant. So that becomes an issue as the two of them go wandering around, trying to find food, shelter, and some place they can call home.McBride's film is a true oddity, shot in grainy film and done to look like some sort of artifact of a time and place (maybe intentional, maybe not), and the two leads are non-professionals. You know, for example, when Steven Curry is shouting out the same 'TIME IS ON MY SIDE' over and over, as it's in his head, this is a performance that is stripped down to its essentials. It's either a very good performance or a bad performance it that makes sense, but this guy is always in it, always showing this crazy kid's curiosity about the world, about the "City" that could be out there - he learns this through his tattered comic book remains he carries with him - and Shelley Plimpton is the same way.As with the McCarthy book The Road we don't get many other people here. There is the tribe early on, but Glen and Randa can't stay there as it's too unstable and Glen wants bigger and brighter things. The last "act" as it were of this gangly narrative takes them to a beach where Randa may finally deliver her child into the world. The ending itself is as bizarre as anything else in the film, but less logical. Why does Glenn do what he does, or Randa, or the baby, or the old man who has another few remnants to help them? In some ways the movie has not stood the test of time, but in a way it has. It's longish-freaky-looking characters are out of the late 60's, victims of the Flower Power movement, but they're also real and tactile and are fascinating to watch just from an anthropological point of view. In other words, it's not like a Mad Max post-apoc future, there are no motorcycle gangs or the like, it's, again, stripped down to where nature has taken over the Earth in major ways. If anything it's low-budget-ness shows a little too much, but the script via Rudy ("Two Lane Blacktop" Wurlitzer makes this experimental and low-key in good ways. What they don't got, they make it an advantage.Simply put: one of the stranger films of 1971.

Glen and Randa is raw and has a hedonistic feel to it. The film was originally released in 1970 with an X rating because of (gasp!) full frontal male nudity! Don't want people to see that male genitalia.The film has a sort of low key, low budget amateurish feel to it at times. There are a few scenes which are sort of strange and silly at the same time. If it had been played serious by all the actors it could have felt sort of sleazy but most of the time it has a slight camp feel to it.The film also has an innocence to it that makes it feel very refreshing. Glen and Randa like to frolic in the nude at times and after exposed to a traveling entertainer they decide to leave their group and travel on their own and find "metropolis", a city with people dressed all in white but find that much isn't left after the holocaust.One other element I enjoyed was that there aren't any crazy people out to kill, rape or mame. You don't have to really worry about what will happen to these two as they travel alone.There are moments that seem very dated and some of the scenes aren't shot that well. It's not a film that makes a huge impact but it does linger in your head a bit afterward mainly because of the youth of the lead characters.

An intriguingly spartan and offbeat avant-garde early 70's excursion into post-nuke sci-fi survivalist cinema centering on the obsessive Glen (muscular, curly-haired Steven Curry) and his more passive female companion Randa (a sweetly disarming performance by the lovely, willowy Shelley Plimpton), a pair of guileless youths trying to eke out a meager existence amid the desolate ruins following an atomic war. After a wily, lecherous old magician (a wonderfully rascally turn by Garry Goodrow) visits Glen and Randa's camp and fills Glen's head full of tales about a great lost city, Glen and a now-pregnant Randa (the magician impregnated her) embark on a dangerous trek across the harsh, ravaged terrain to discover this great city that Glen first read all about in an old "Wonder Women" comic book. During their perilous quest Glen and Randa meet a friendly, doddering elderly man (an endearingly crotchety Woodrow Chambliss; Uncle Willie in the funky '72 made-for-TV creature feature favorite "Gargoyles") and Randa gives birth to a baby.Director Jim McBride (who later helmed such better known big budget films as "The Big Easy" and "Great BAlls of Fire") skillfully uses an extremely plain, basic and unpolished no-frills cinematic style to plausibly create a vivid depiction of the banality and hopelessness of day-to-day post-holocaust existence, thus giving this bleak, albeit strangely haunting and affecting apocalyptic vision an unshakable sense of gritty, lived-in conviction. The bare-bones, but eloquent and sometimes wittily droll script by McBride, Lorenzo Manns, and Rudolph Wurlitzer (who went on to write "Two-Lane Blacktop" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid") relates with deceptive simplicity and straightforwardness a lyrically powerful parable with provocative religious allusions (Glen and Randa's odyssey could be interpreted as Adam and Eve's fall from grace after leaving the garden of Eden) about lost innocence and a futile search for an irrevocably vanished past paradise. Kudos as well to Alan Raymond's flat, spare, minimalist cinematography, which uses long, lingering, unedited takes, stately tracking shots, and elegant fade-outs to convey a wealth of striking visuals: the rusty hulk of a car with tree branches growing out of it, a horde of grimy survivors glumly rummaging through the rubble for cans of food, Randa ravenously devouring grass and worms, Glen savagely beating several fish with a stick, and the oddly poignant final shot of Glen and the old man drifting out to sea on a rickety boat are all indelible moments that stick in your memory after seeing the movie. A pleasingly quirky and truly novel one-of-a-kind experimental oddity.

I thought this was a really interesting antidote to all of the mow-hawked and black leather-wearing silliness that seems to occur after the apocalypse in every other movie of this type. There are no marauding gangs of motorbike riders here. The innocence and ignorance of the titular characters is alarming enough; seeing them foolishly expend all of their wooden matches because its amusing to them before they attempt to cross what looks like the Cascade Mountain range is painful to watch! I happen to think that if anyone ever did survive an Extinction Level Event,they might behave something like Glen and Randa; what has destroyed the world is never explained; no mention of nuclear war is made and when the characters stand at what is obviously the west coast of either Oregon or California and explain that ..."about ten miles that way there used to be a city called Boise!" you realize that whatever happened, it was massive;nuclear warheads don't re-shape the coastline! The found sets--wrecked cars sunk in sand, mobile homes that look as if Godzilla stomped on them, a rusty derailed train half submerged in a river--lend a sense of surrealistic realism to the film, if that makes any sense. This movie moves at a slow pace but i was captivated by it, wondering what would happen next. I think one of the most powerful aspects of this film is the fact that there are NO characters who provide a sense of sanity and strength; all of the older characters seem to have been driven into a sort of semi-schizophrenic absent-mindedness by whatever it was that slammed the crap out of the old civilization and the 2 youngsters seem so ignorant and unaware of the inherent dangers of their travels that you seriously worry about their safety as they tramp barefooted thru the mountains, across deserts, etc etc. I would recommend this film as an example of what can still be done with the post-apocalyptic genre. This one was a breath of fresh air.