Summer of Love

It was 40 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. The year 1967 also witnessed the flowering (metaphorical and literal) of the “Summer of Love,” when some 75,000 hippie kids converged on the iconic axis of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco for free love, music, drugs, food, and medical care, all of which had the side effect of seriously straining the city's infrastructure (bummer). Originally aired on PBS's American Experience series, Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco's Summer of Love is a serviceable look at a watershed moment in American cultural history, the reverberations of which are still being felt today in a wide variety of sociopolitical arenas (from protesting the Iraq War to teaching tolerance for others). Combining archival footage and stills with talking-head interviews (including usual suspects Peter Coyote and Theodore Roszak), the film traces the arc of that fateful year, from the January 14 Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park—where 20,000 people listened to the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Timothy Leary—to the “death of hippie” mock funeral held on October 6 that signaled the end (before long the Haight district would be host to scores of vacant storefronts such as the former Ron and Jay Thelin's Psychedelic Shop). Although many baby boomers will be familiar with most of the material here (if you actually can still remember the '60, you're likely to know most of what's covered here), a few interviews stand out, including one with William Hedgepeth, whom Look magazine sent undercover to write an exposé of the flower children (looked like “a perfectly good alternative universe to me”). Unfortunately, aside from a brief clip of the Dead and Scott McKenzie's hit “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” no ‘60s music is featured on the soundtrack. For the most part, however this sanitized (though not whitewashed) overview—minus nudity, graphic drug use, or profanity (with the exception of Coyote's use of the word “bullshit” four times near the very end, in statements such as “I don't think that the search for justice and some kind of economic equity is ever bullshit”)—captures the zeitgeist of the summer of '67 while also acknowledging the logistical limitations of a massive near-spontaneous social utopia. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)