romanorum1 In "R.P.M." students take over and occupy the administration building of a California college as school President Tyler resigns. After midnight, the College Board of Trustees decides to replace Tyler with Professor "Paco" Perez (Anthony Quinn), a 53 year-old sociology teacher. He has three main assets: (1) He is popular with the student body, (2) he has a Spanish surname, and his hiring would exemplify progressivism, and (3) he lives with a 25 year-old graduate student Rhoda (Ann-Margret) who has difficulty in staying clothed. An obvious liberal, Perez attempts to negotiate with the students. A problematic situation arises as he became part of the "establishment" when he was appointed by conservative deans. He agrees with 75 percent of the student demands, but those concessions are not enough. One of the three demands not accepted is that the students want to hire the professors! But the students, led by 33 year-old grad student Gary Lockwood (Rossiter) and 31 year-old Paul Winfield (Dempsey), are reticent. When they do not obtain acceptance on ALL of their demands, they foolishly decide to destroy school property (computer equipment). As Perez is backed up against a wall, his option is to call in the police. So where is the resolution? Erich Segal's script is trite and hardly rises above comic-book level. Concerning the film's direction, where is the genuine emotion and character development? Anthony Quinn is always good, but in this movie he is miscast. Worse, 30 year-old Ann-Margret's performance as a collegian is ludicrous; she is way too old to be a typical grad student. As she does not exactly radiate intelligentsia, one wonders how she ever became an undergraduate. The impression does arise that she may have earned her bachelor's degree by lying on her back. Chemistry is lacking between her and lover Quinn, whom she even calls a hypocrite. Both Lockwood and Winfield are also too old for their respective characters.The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time of college campus radicalization, although the students on the far left comprised only a small percentage of the school population. But they were both vocal and active. They were quite volatile, hence R.P.M. = Revolutions per Minute. All in all, this pointless movie certainly shows its age.

SanteeFats Okay some people really didn't like this movie but I did. Yeah the revolting students are stereotypically revolting in their acting and words. Of course I may be just a little biased as I was over in Nam in 1970 (71 and 73 too). So when the cops start busting up the hippies it didn't bother me too much. Now everything leading up to that part was okay as far as acting went. The script seemed a little trite with the speeches by the protesters, pretty standard gibberish of the times. Anthony Quinn did his usual fine job. He is a liberal professor who gets stuck with the deanship of the school when the former one retires from stress caused by the sit in. He tries to talk with the sitters but they not only will not yield on the last three of twelve demands even after getting 1 thru 9 agreed too but are extremely insulting and rude to him. Not really the way to get what you want if you make the powers that be mad. Quinn finally has enough and sends in the cops. Heads get busted and 7 students and 4 cops get sent to the hospital. Ann-Margret is the half his age grad student who he is living with at the time. She is a liberal and cannot understand when Quinn sends in the cops. At the end you see her and other students break the police line to help the sitters who are getting the snot beat out of them. Teda Bracci plays one of the sitters. She is a horse face with the worst attitude of the whole bunch, then when she breaks out with the others kicks two cops in, shall we say, the lower regions. I was so hoping to see her clubbed to the ground and be one of the seven. Oh well, it is only a movie after all.

John Seal Unavailable on home video and absent from television for decades until a recent screening on Turner Classic Movies, R.P.M. stars Anthony Quinn as Paco Perez, a professor trying to get down with the kids on a strife-torn California college campus. Always one to sympathize with his students, Paco finds himself thrust into a position of authority after activists take over the school's administration building. The Board of Trustees names him President because the kids trust him, but he finds some of their demands hard to comply with, raising the question: how much revolution is too much revolution? Ann-Margret co-stars as Paco's grad student mistress (surely grounds for dismissal?), Paul Winfield and Gary Lockwood agitate the masses, and--in brilliant casting--an uncredited S.I. Hayakawa (himself a veteran of a student sit-in at San Francisco State University) appears as a semantics instructor. Quinn is very good standing in for aging liberal director Stanley Kramer, who probably felt lost at sea during the radical late sixties, but the film's Achilles' Heel is Eric Segal's screenplay, which is generally (though not unremittingly) awful.

bababear A writer quipped that EASY RIDER was the most expensive movie ever made. Sure, it only cost 400 thousand to make and grossed 60 million. But Hollywood got the idea that it had to produce "youth" movies and so we got THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT and THE Christian LICORICE STORE and THE MAGIC GARDEN OF STANLEY SWEETHEART and this movie, pretty much all of which are forgotten and got limited or no release.Woodstock was in August of 1969. Altamont was in December of 1969. This means that the Woodstock Nation lasted barely four months. Elizabeth Taylor has kept husbands longer than that.What the major studios did was get mainstream directors and told them make movies about youth in revolt. The result was movies like this which were very expensive imitations of movies that American-International had made in the sixties on nonexistent budgets.RPM is watchable for a fine performance by Anthony Quinn. Lord, but he's a trooper. The script was obsolete before the ink dried on it. I'll be generous and say that Eric Segal's screenplay stinks. Of course, forty years later LOVE STORY doesn't get all that much love anyway.The story centers on a Sociology professor who is picked to be president of a fictional college after protesting students occupy the administration building. The board has a late night meeting and decides to appoint Quinn president based primarily on the fact that he's sleeping with a graduate student in his department who is young enough to be his daughter.Imagine trying to sell that to a major studio in today's Politically Correct world. Ann-Margret plays the graduate student and recognizes the script to be crap, so she has fun playing this airhead and wears ridiculous costumes and, in one scene, talks with while chewing food so that audiences won't have to understand the words she's saying.Incredibly, this is directed by Stanley Kramer. Kramer had become a legend directing films like THE DEFIANT ONES, INHERIT THE WIND, SHIP OF FOOLS, JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, and GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, all of which dealt with Big Ideas from a socially progressive point of view. More importantly, they were full of characters that audiences could identify with and were fully realized human beings.RPM is like a pageant put on by a community college Sociology department. Characters represent Sexual Freedom, Corporate Apathy, Prejudice, Sexual Liberation, Black Power, etc.At its peak, the student revolution actually appealed to a very small per cent of students and had little support from the mainstream community. Worse yet, this film was released in the middle of Nixon's first term of office. Youthful idealism faded as more students pursued graduate studies in Business Administration.Thanks to Turner Classic Movies for running this. I'd heard of it, but figured that Columbia Pictures had destroyed all the existing prints hoping nobody would remember it. Somehow TCM found a pristine print in excellent condition. It would have gotten just one out of ten, but I had to recognize Quinn's excellent work trying to make a dead horse run.