I saw this movie a couple of times when I was in high school. They kept showing it at the university. I didn't realize they filmed it at the local community college.
Elliott Gould plays a former campus radical Vietnam Veteran who returns to college to get his teaching credential. He's trying to graduate. His professors are mad at him and he's trying to focus on school rather than political activism. He rails against his girlfriend (Candice Bergen's) petit bourgeois tendencies while pursuing a teaching career himself.
Things were very different back then.
"Why, Harry? Why a teaching credential?" a friend asks.
"Money...money and power and little girls to molest!" he says. "It's a great life."
It was presumably a joke, but he shouted this on a crowded campus. And, come to think of it, he was teaching a freshman English class and sleeps with one of his students.
He calls his girlfriend a "dumb broad" at one point and there are a couple of anti-gay things. He was pretty stodgy for a radical.
He struggles to pay his $150 tuition, but that was over $1,000 in today's money. You could buy a ten-year-old car for $150 back then, but cars weren't built to last ten years in those days. Elliott Gould drives a 1958 Bel Air, only 12-years-old when this thing was filmed, but it was a hopeless wreck.
He probably wouldn't have been much of a teacher. He yells a lot and flies off the handle. If he had been a music major, it could have been a prequel to Mr Holland's Opus.
With Harrison Ford in a small role.
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