The 1967 Jack Nicholson-penned drug movie that took 35 years to be released in the UK
It’s easy for us who weren’t around in the 1960s to see it as an idealised time of hippie revolution, where everyone was basking in free love, psychedelic rock, smoking a load of weed, and regularly dropping acid.
London was swinging, while the Summer of Love took hold in 1967 with thousands of young people descending on the streets of San Francisco to enjoy these indulgent delights, as a reaction against conservatism and tradition. The Monterey Pop Festival was a landmark event, defining the period’s exciting hopes for the new generation, which genuinely wondered if the world would become a better place if more people simply smoked a joint, had a threesome, and listened to Jimi Hendrix.
It was only idyllic for a short time, though, because, like everything else, it was soon destroyed by commercialism, which wasn’t very ‘hippie’ at all, with the harsh political climate of the ‘60s just too strong to find world peace by spending all your time passing round tabs of acid and being promiscuous.
It just doesn’t work because people are always going to find a way to abuse a good thing, and naturally, the rife drug culture that the era championed only resulted in the creation of countless young addicts and early deaths. Naturally, many people were concerned about the behaviour that these young people were engaging in, seeing it as dangerous, amoral, and simply against tradition, so when a movie was released that year that appeared to be pro-acid and pro-experimentation, it didn’t take long before it earned a ban in certain places, like the United Kingdom.
Written by a young Jack Nicholson and directed by B-movie icon Roger Corman with future Easy Rider actor Peter Fonda in the leading role, The Trip even has a very hippie-esque Dennis Hopper in the cast. Nicholson isn’t actually in the movie, but it was a pivotal moment in his career regardless, gaining vital experience in the industry by writing the movie before he’d become a major star. Of course, just two years later, he would appear in Easy Rider with Fonda and Hopper, which would land him an Oscar nomination.
The movie sees Fonda’s Paul, who makes television advertisements for a living, drop acid for the first time, and it focuses on the sensory experience of taking a hallucinogenic drug, with many kaleidoscopic scenes flowing freely, bright colours and shapes moving across the screen as though we’ve been given some LSD, too. Paul engages in various sexual encounters and contemplates life and his job, and really, few films sum up the decade’s interest in psychedelic and lysergic experimentation quite like The Trip.
While the movie has a few scenes that seem to emphasise the dangers of taking acid, added at the behest of the studio, The Trip is pretty on the fence on the whole, offering a rather non-judgemental vision of experimenting with substances that alter your mind. Corman wasn’t one to judge; everyone was doing it back then, it seemed, and he just wanted to document this prominent countercultural moment, regardless of the controversy it could bring. Yet, because the movie doesn’t outwardly condemn taking acid, British censors freaked out, with the BBFC rejecting it every time it was submitted for classification, but eventually, in 2002, it was passed with an 18 rating for home video release.
In a 1967 interview, Fonda explained that “The Trip has no moral point of view. But kids won’t see it and then run and take acid. I don’t think they will. And the adults, man, they hate it. They just sit there looking at the screen, and they hate it.”
The BBFC clearly weren’t convinced that kids wouldn’t be inspired by the film to take drugs, so for 35 years, if you lived in the United Kingdom, there was absolutely no chance for you to catch Fonda’s character experiencing a strange and sexy trip. Nevermind though, you could watch him experiencing one in Easy Rider two years later, and that one was a lot less encouraging of taking acid.
