The Distant Drummer is a short-lived series of four 22-minute American documentary films produced in the early 1970s as a societal warning against the proliferation of drugs during the counterculture of the 1960s.
Mitchum, who had been arrested in September 1948 for possession of marijuana and served 43 days at a California prison farm (the conviction was overturned in January 1951), subsequently narrated the 1973 anti-marijuana-and-LSD documentary short America on the Rocks.
In each city across the land there exists another culture whose very philosophy and way of life rejects the fierce competition and its material rewards… and, in so doing, refutes the order of discipline of the establishment.
Thousands of snapshots on police station walls remain the only link between many of America's most affluent families and the children who embodied their great expectations.
For some, there exists a social imperative beyond flaunting society's rules – for these adventurers the mind-expanding drugs open a window on a whole new frontier..." Alongside such familiar counterculture documentaries as Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock, which was also released the same year as A Movable Scene and A Movable Feast, a number of little-known and rarely-seen features and short films depicting the hippie era were also produced in the early 1970s and remain as time-capsule chronicles of their period.