The Strawberry Statement

The phone rings in the college president’s office. A co-ed, one of many students in the room, picks up. “We’re sorry, the president will not be in today. The university is under new management.”

Set to anthemic songs of the time, The Strawberry Statement is both about and from the era of protests that swept campuses in the 1960s and ’70s. Bruce Davison plays Simon, an athlete drawn to the excitement of a demonstration, and to a girl (Kim Darby) he meets and, ultimately, to the cause. The film ends with a police and National Guard raid on protesters that gave viewers of the day a knowing unease: student demonstrators had been shot–some fatally—at Kent State University and Jackson State College in the month prior to the film’s release.