The Trip (1967; Roger Corman)

Would you drop acid with Bruce Dern?

Before Peter Fonda made the trailblazing Easy Rider with his co-star Dennis Hopper, he was already a counterculture icon from The Trip, in the role of Paul Grove, a TV commercial director on the verge of a divorce from Sally (Susan Strasberg) who falls in with some Hollywood hippy-dippy types, and eventually goes on his first cosmic journey of LSD at Bruce Dern’s pad (see above).  The rest of the film is that long day’s journey through a burning brain where reality and illusion jam on a merry-go-round.  It’s Blowup for the Monkees generation, it’s Chappaqua filmed as a cartoon.

The Trip is a surprisingly non-exploitative film about the LSD phenomenon that crept its way through the jet set.  It opens with a lengthy written prologue onscreen, read aloud by one of those inimitable dry, stern voices of drivers’ education films: “We hope that this will be in informative picture...”. In truth, nothing much has changed from the days of Reefer Madness. A film that intends to educate an audience about pot, booze or VD will sell tickets because the audience wants to vicariously experience the sinful pleasures that the screen characters have, until they pay the steep price for such transgressions. 

The first image is a scene being filmed for a commercial, as seen through the camera lens.  Already we are introduced to a world that is representative, a fabrication of reality. The natural world is made to look alien, even in love scenes shot with a cloth on the lens. Soon, our eye is witnessing the warped viewfinder of a hallucinating mind with its own methods of fabrication.  Shot with various filters, distorted lenses, polarization and strobe effects, The Trip is a very "1967" catalogue of visual tricks that attempt to replicate a psychedelic experience. 

For a commercial film sold as exploitation, it is avant-garde in form and content. Jack Nicholson's screenplay ignores conventional narrative and clinically observes Fonda’s “day trip”: a messy slog through a life in tatters, a mind unable to rationalize. For its deliberately untidy story structure, and imaginative montage sequences, it is small wonder this film was written about in journals usually reserved for the "New American Cinema" scene which championed experimental and underground works, circa 1943 to the 1960s. The "psychedelic sequences" of layered images and solarized colour (evocative of Francis Thompson and Kenneth Anger) were supervised by Dennis Jakob (later an editing consultant for Koyaanisqatsi!). Dennis Hopper (who co-stars as Max, the second person to "guide" Paul through an acid trip), was also an uncredited second-unit director: presumably of some footage used in these sequences. The influence of avant-garde filmmakers on Hollywood movies is especially relevant in 1971's The Last Movie, which Hopper would direct. (The actor was also good friends with collage filmmaker Bruce Conner.)

In his marvellous autobiography, How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime, Roger Corman discusses his well-publicized LSD trip prior to making the movie, and the experience was not unpleasant.  This was why he chose the film to seem rather neutral in its exposition of LSD. His intent was to let the audience make up its own mind about whether acid was dangerous. However, American-International Pictures changed the original ambiguous ending behind his back. (This was not the last time that executive producer Sam Arkoff went against Corman's wishes. Arkoff's post-production tinkering of 1970's "should have been great" Gas! or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It caused Corman sever his ties with AIP for good, and would soon set up his own company, New World Pictures.)

Even so, as much as one applauds the efforts, The Trip still falls short of its intentions, as it becomes limited by its own vocabulary. All of the candy-coloured, razzle dazzle seduction cannot sustain its feature length. The visual gimmickry is shown in second person, not in POV, which then meshes with “straight” scenes of Fonda still dazedly fumbling around in love-ins and laundromats. Some of the "trip" sequences, with their "horror movie" imagery, recall Corman's own Poe pictures, which feel in the wrong film. 

Still, for these innovations, and as an artifact of its era, this movie is well worth seeing. It is a catalog of wild mini-skirted chicks, groovy apartments, and psychedelic night club freak outs where The Electric Flag (playing a fictional outfit called The American Music Band) jams and jams. (Buy the soundtrack album!) This, and his previous film, The Wild Angels, are important benchmarks in Roger Corman's career. These pictures chronicle the 60s generation with a near documentary "matter of fact" approach, which at least caused European film writers to take his work very seriously. He will forever be associated with the "King of the Bs" label, which is rather dismissive of his intelligence and acute awareness of burgeoning pop culture or socio-political trends, which adorn his films.  

The producer-director was always one to recognize talent that would soon grow to other things: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper (who gets to say “m-a-a-n"), Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern (doing a turtleneck and tweed Cliffs Notes version of Dr. Leary) would soon be major players in the 1970s Hollywood Renaissance. And yet, this picture amusingly gives nods to some of his previous stock company, with cute oval-jawed Luana Anders in a great cameo, and Dick Miller showing up long enough to pour a drink. Corman regulars Barboura Morris, Beach Dickerson, and Peter Bogdanovich(!) also appear in bits, as do Angelo Rossitto, Michael Blodgett and Tom Signorelli. For these reasons and more, The Trip feels otherworldly and familiar.

The Trip was available on VHS through Orion (who had purchased the AIP catalog). And then Orion was purchased by MGM, who distributed many AIP titles for DVD. The movie appeared in their awesome Midnite Movies label (paired with Psych-Out) and in their set The Roger Corman Collection. Olive Films has recently released both film individually on Blu-ray.