cult film freak: GARY LOCKWOOD PROTESTS 'R.P.M.' STARRING ANTHONY QUINN

Gary Lockwood in R.P.M. Year: 1970 Rating: **1/2

A year after Gary Lockwood was slightly too old to play a hapless hippie about to go to Vietnam, cruising around L. A. with nothing to do but get stoned in MODEL SHOP, he played an even younger hippie and is completely miscast... especially since he's also balding... but this rebel at least has a cause...

Leader of a student group taking over a university's computer center, Lockwood (along with fellow thirty-something Paul Winfield) have demands for a liberal sociology professor they once really dug...

Gary Lockwood and Anthony Quinn in R.P.M.

That's where star Anthony Quinn, hired as a kind of emergency dean/president, comes in: spending most of the picture either engaged in long discussions with comparably uptight university profs or hanging out with young girlfriend Ann-Margret, who, like Lockwood, has little to do but spout smug counter-culture platitudes in what feels more like a progressive TV-movie than a watered-down big-screen expose on college revolutionaries, hence the R. P. M. title standing for Revolutions Per Minute...

But there's only one revolution... that drags despite Lockwood having a few good monologues opening up to Quinn: yet the audience can't entirely relate to his plight/agenda since sympathetic left-wing director Stanley Kramer (and scriptwriter Erich Segal) never allow the characters to grow beyond clichés — on either side of the aisle.