1970’s The Revolutionary tells the story of a young man named A (Jon Voight).
When we first meet him, A is a college student who lives in the industrial town of Axton. A comes from a wealthy family but he chooses to live in a tiny and quite frankly repellent apartment. He has a girlfriend named Ann (Collin Wilcox). A and Ann don’t really seem to have much of a relationship. “We should make love,” A says in a flat tone of voice. Ann is willing to show her emotions while the self-serious A goes through life with everything under wraps. Ann and A are both members of a radical political group. The group spends a lot of time talking and discussing theory but they don’t really do much else.
A grows frustrated with the group. He gets a job at a factory, where he falls under the sway of a communist named Despard (Robert Duvall). Despard is a bit more active than A’s former comrades. Despard, for instance, is willing to call a general strike but, when that strike still fails, A, along with Despard and everyone else involved, goes underground. Suspended from the university, he soon finds himself being drafted into the Army. His father asks A if he wants to be drafted. A questions why only the poor should be drafted. His father looks at A as if he’s hopelessly naive and his father might be right.
A continues to wander around Axton in an idealistic daze, trying to get people to read the flyers that he spends his time passing out. Things change when A meets Leonard II (Seymour Cassel), a radical who recruits A into an apparent suicide mission….
The Revolutionary took me by surprise. On the one hand, it’s definitely very much a political film. The movie agrees with A’s politics. But, at the same time, the film is also willing to be critical of A and his self-righteous view of the world. One gets the feeling that A’s politics have less to do with sincere belief and more to do with his own need to be a part of something. Up until the film’s final few minute, A is something of a passive character, following orders until he’s finally forced to decide for himself what his next move is going to be. A’s father thinks he’s a fool. Despard views him as being an interloper. Even Leonard II seems to largely view A as being a pawn. A wanders through Axton, trying to find his place in the chaos of the times.
It’s not a perfect film, of course. The pace is way too slow. Referring to the lead character only as “A” is one of those 70s things that feels embarrassingly cutesy today. As was the case with many counterculture films of the early 70s, the film’s visuals often mistake graininess with authenticity. Seriously, this film features some of the ugliest production design that I’ve ever seen. But for every scene that doesn’t work or that plays out too slow, there’s one that’s surprisingly powerful, like when an army of heavily armored policemen break up a demonstration. The film itself is full of talented actors. Seymour Cassel is both charismatic and kind of frightening as the unstable Leonard II. Jon Voight and Robert Duvall are both totally convincing as the leftist revolutionary and his communist mentor. (In real life, of course, Voight and Duvall would become two of Hollywood’s most prominent Republicans.) In The Revolutionary, Duvall brings a certain working class machismo to the role of Despard and Voight does a good job of capturing both A’s intelligence and his growing detachment. A can be a frustrating and passive character but Voight holds the viewer’s interest.
The film works because it doesn’t try to turn A into some sort of hero. In the end, A is just a confused soul trying to figure out what his place is in a rapidly changing world. Thanks to the performance of Voight, Duvall, and Cassel, it’s a far more effective film than it perhaps has any right to be.
Through the Shattered Lens 