Getting Straight was released during an era of change and unrest in the United States in the late 1960s and early '70s, and was in a long line of films that dealt with these themes.
In February 1967, Mike Frankovich, head of Columbia Pictures, announced he had bought the rights to the novel Getting Straight by Ken Kolb.
[4] Director Richard Rush had impressed with his AIP films Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) and Psych-Out (1968) and was signed to an independent deal with Columbia.
"It is the result of the inability of an entire generation on a personal, individual level to accept the disparities in the morality at the foundation of our society.
"It was risky material because the war was still going on and students were at the barricades and Hollywood movies weren’t really addressing this stuff yet head-on", Rush says.
[15] Filming started July 7, 1969 in Eugene, Oregon, with Lane Community College standing in for the fictional university.
"[3] He said the actor was "incredibly inventive, tremendously flexible" and that Bergen was "a genuine dedicated, bright human being" who made "an extraordinary breakthrough.
"[17] When filming ended Kaufman wrote "we have sought to record, with a sense of humor, the reality of today's student protest, campus riots, and establishment reprisals.
When I suddenly had the equipment to do that, with the tear gas and the paddy wagons and the helicopters, it became a different version of the movie than I had originally pictured in my head as I had written it.
"[20] Rush says "We shot the film on a very long lens, so we could peer inside and outside of the classrooms on the campus to gather relevant information, and get interesting angles in order to create a mood of tension or unpredictability.
[22] The film was one of a number of movies made about campus unrest at this time, others including The Strawberry Statement, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, The Pursuit of Happiness, The Revolutionary, Up in the Cellar, Zabriskie Point and RPM.
[9] Howard Thompson of The New York Times wrote, "A brilliant, mercurial performance by Elliott Gould steadies and vivifies but cannot save 'Getting Straight' ... A serious-minded, freewheeling comedy, pivoting on student unrest and rebellion on the contemporary campus scene, succumbs to theatrics and, structurally, the very conventions it deplores.
"[24] Also writing in The New York Times, Dwight Macdonald called it "a bad movie" that "reminds me of a grunt-and-groan wrestling match that tries by overemphasis to make the customers forget it's fixed.
Elliott Gould's third smash performance in a year, herein as a disenchanted college student-teacher, makes him an undeniable screen star.
"[28] Richard Combs of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Perfectly maintaining the balance between acute exasperation and a vivid intellectual energy, Elliott Gould manages to endow Harry with something of the air of a prophet returned from the wilderness, certain of his personal truth although by no means certain of achieving it, and not to be goaded into becoming the spokesman for a new generation of icon levellers.
"[29] Leonard Maltin's movie guide awarded two-and-a-half stars out of four and noted that the film essentially was a "period piece" but that its "central issue of graduate student (Elliott) Gould choosing between academic double-talk and his beliefs remains relevant.
"[citation needed] Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote- "Getting Straight is a very ambitious film that is too small for its britches".