WUSA (1970)

**_“I’m just trying to stay alive… and stay human”_**

This marked the reteaming of director Stuart Rosenber and Paul Newman after their success with “Cool Hand Luke” 2½ years earlier. Robert Stone wrote the script based on his 1967 book “A Hall of Mirrors,” which fleshes out several characters involved with the top issues of the era: rightwing-ism, civil rights, women’s liberation and the counterculture.

Newman stars as a disillusioned alcoholic who gets a job in The Big Easy working as a disc jockey at Conservative radio station, while Joanne Woodward plays his new gal pal, who honestly tries to get a job but often settles for prostitution. Anthony Perkins is on hand as their bleeding-heart neighbor who works as a welfare surveyor. The quality cast also includes Laurence Harvey, Pat Hingle, Cloris Leachman, Don Gordon and Moses Gunn.

It’s a Southern Gothic with moralizing in the tradition of Tennessee Williams’ “The Fugitive Kind” and Woodward’s “Rachel, Rachel” meshed with a bit o’ “The Manchurian Candidate.” The problem is that Stone made the dialogues too allusive. All of the characters speak in one way or another of the issues noted above, but never directly. It becomes tedious after a while. The production needed someone like Tennessee Williams to do a rewrite.

But the worst infraction is the disingenuous way the so-called Conservatives and their corresponding rally are depicted. So, the executive is trying to expose people scamming the welfare system, how exactly is this “propaganda”? Don’t taxpaying citizens deserve to know if their tax funds are fraudulently used? Shouldn’t they be righteously angry about this?

Then there’s the “white power” balloons at the rally. Why Sure! You’d actually never see “white power” emblems during that era but, by golly, you’d see “black power” symbols everywhere, even patches sold in comic books!

And what about the arena filled with 15,000 white supremacists in freakin’ New Orleans, a city that’s been a Dem stronghold for the previous hundred years, going back to 1872? Estimates of active Klan members in 1970 was actually less than 2000 people in the entire USA. Needless to say, this part of the film is guilty of complete detachment from reality. Patriotic or Conservative Americans actually value citizens of all colors in their movement.

Interestingly, someone criticized Laurence Harvey for his beard as the minister, but he actually looks a lot like East Texas-based Mike Murdock did in the 1980s-2000s. Speaking of Harvey’s character, would such a pastor working in the inner urban area of a blue city have no qualms about appearing at a televised rally with “white power” balloons in the air? Again, complete detachment from reality.

Yet, the film gets several things right, such as the irate Lib response to legit fraud exposure or the ultimate, immature way they handle political opponents (think the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt in Butler, PA).

It runs 1h 55m and was shot in the spring of 1969 in New Orleans.

GRADE: D+