Review of In Search of America

Fans of Bridges may enjoy checking out this pilot for a proposed series, though it's likely to leave most viewers scrambling for the fast-forward button on their remote. He plays a college student who shocks his upper middle-class family by announcing that he's going to 'drop-out', meaning to go see the country in a rehabbed old bus and eschew all the suburban trappings he's grown up with. In a surprise development, his parents, Betz and Miles, and his sassy grandma McDevitt decide that, rather than wonder and worry over his decision, they will drop out, too! The foursome loads into the bus and sets off across the land. Unfortunately, their big adventure leads solely to one place; the dingy, dirty site of a rock festival, packed with hippies. The hippie friends include Anderson and his pregnant girlfriend Daly, antagonistic Mineo, gibberish-spouting Thurman and musically inclined, mysteriously solemn Jarrett. Before long, Bridges has begun to fall for Jarrett, but her straight-laced parents, Duff and Hunter, have come to retrieve her. Several conflicts and dramatic situations develop and are resolved before the family departs, ostensibly to continue its journey on a weekly series that, unsurprisingly, did not develop. Betz and Miles make a believable couple and have occasional moments of effective acting. He had had years of experience as a daddy on "The Donna Reed Show" and she was still quite lovely in spite of her rather dowdy role here. Bridges is young, lean, fresh and generally likable. McDevitt tries awfully hard to be spunky and amusing in her somehow grating role, though she does get a nice little moment near the end. Duff and Hunter do all right, obviously slumming for the fee of a guest star appearance. Jarrett isn't a particularly appealing or interesting, making a key storyline less compelling that it could have been. What's really sad is seeing former film star Mineo reduced to playing the non-role of an over-aged druggie in a piece of disposable junk like this. The film was clearly shot in a thatch of woods somewhere while stock footage of a Woodstock-ish festival is spliced in to try to give the piece some verisimilitude. The music for the film is likely to please only the smallest percentage of viewers as it's a loud, ersatz Mamas and the Papas or 5th Dimension imitation. There's also a ludicrous scene in which a turkey (of all things!) is placed in the stove on the bus and somehow burns pitch black in just a few minutes. Probably the most enjoyable segment of the movie is when Betz and Bridges strip off their shirts to work on the bus, painting and repairing away years of neglect. Nothing that follows is quite as watchable as that!