moonspinner55 Young people stammering and fumbling their way through the rites of passage in this extremely mild adaptation of Robert H. Rimmer's novel. New enrollees at Harrad College, run by a sexually uninhibited couple who encourage their students to be intimate, approach the male-female roommate law differently. Nervous Bruno Kirby (billed as B. Kirby, Jr.) is amusing when coupled with a forward blonde (his voice goes up whenever he talks to her), while virginal Laurie Walters shares space with unassuming stud Don Johnson. The curriculum is rather obscure (only two classes on the first day, beginning with Nude Yoga!). The prurient-minded may find the semester's results disappointing; the film has unblushing nude scenes, but the agenda is to enlighten, to broaden horizons, which means the film is more pedagogic than titillating. Richard Kline should be demoted for his overly-bright, overly-bland cinematography. As the adults, James Whitmore and Tippi Hedren keep a straight face, but good intentions can only take the film so far. Followed by "Harrad Summer" the next year. ** from ****

silvrdal I just watched a bowdlerized version of "The Harrad Experiment". I'd heard of this movie, but had never seen it. It stars Tippi Hedren, James Whitmore Jr., and a very ( almost unrecognizably ) young Don Johnson. The story concerns a small college which has gone co-ed to an extreme. Boys are deliberately room-mated with girls, and the couples are encouraged to have sexual intimacy. Now, had that sort of film been made, today, you'd have a mind-boggling, no-holds-barred sex-fest; but back in 1973, they made a sort of tentative pastel-water-color story with bland characters and dialogue, sprinkled with curses the actors seem to choke while saying. Mind you, I wasn't disappointed, I was relieved. This movie is sort of an icon of modern 'sex as salvation' subject matter in film. The movie comes off as a kind of bland, sex-driven "After-School Special". The script is vanilla and cliché-ridden; with lots of pop-psychology and not-quite-there challenges to 'old-fashined' mores. Hedren and Whitmore are the married professors conducting the experiment. We never quite know whether they're actually ( hypocritically ) condoning 'free-love' or whether they're trying to point out to the students that monogamous relationships really are the strongest. Either way, they are dangerously close to law-suits. The curriculum is so wishy-washy that, in comparison, Alfred Kinsey's 'research' looks like the Sodom and Gomorrah Pride Parade ( actually, it probably was ). Intimacy seems to be their real goal, rather than merely pandering to one's sexual gluttony, but they are terribly stupid in encouraging 'sexual freedom' as a means of discovering that. The style of the film is so typically early-70's with its light, cheerful, guitar background music and sunny edge-lit cinematography; that I expected Karen Carpenter to start singing "Rainy Days and Mondays". It renders the film, unintentionally, quite funny. There are three folk/pop tunes sung in the film's background, two beautifully performed by Lori Lieberman, and the last by ( what?! ) Don Johnson, himself, and not badly, either. Other than the Lieberman songs, the only real highlight of the film is an amusing improv team ( The Ace Trucking Company -- featuring a young Fred Willard ) performing on the topic of 'group marriage'. Most likely, the film would have seemed maybe 2% edgier with all the nudity and G-D's left in, but I seriously doubt it. I could tell where the cuts were made and there was precious little eye-poison in this watery Lorimar Production. A real surprise is that one of the writers was ( and I blinked twice when I read his name ) Ted ( Lurch, the butler ) Cassidy. He has a cameo early in the film. I can't recommend the film, due to its themes ( insipidly as they were presented ), but I'm glad that I've been able to check off and discount another cheesy step on the ladder to our current gradual cultural downfall ( "The April Fools", "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" being others ).

gordonporch The original, theater and maybe VHS, were excellent. I have bought two different DVDs of this movie and both were horrible TV versions. The first was from Amazon (Passion Productions, 98 minutes (?) and no nudity or language and the color was orange like from a really old film that hadn't been taken of. The BN (Platinum) had much better color (90 minutes) but it was about the same "cut to death" version losing the kids working on nudity and bleeped language that is on TV today. One really great lesson that hasn't been mentioned is Tenhousen's (sp?), James Whitmore, teaching, "People only recognize an action as love when it is the same kind of love that they give." I learned something from that and I have run across many real life examples to support that observation. I would still like to get a DVD that was the theater version that I saw but I don't know how I would recognize the version after being burned twice.

David Edward Martin My friends and I read the HARRAD EXPERIMENT by Robert Rimmer as nervous teenagers in the early 70s. The book was a manifesto for sexual awareness and responsibility, a call for a rational development of sexual activity on a cultural basis. Of course at the time, we were just looking for the hot parts....Anyway, the movie makers were given the thankless task of transforming the book and apparently cound not decide whether to make it a polemic or a soap opera. Worse, the plot they chose betrays the format of the book, where the narrative was shared equally buy two men and two women. The film concentrates on Johnson's character, maligning him and transforming the film into his character's unwilling education in sexual responsibility.Bruno Kirby doing full frontal nudity? Brrrrr..........