Unavailable on home video and absent from television for decades until a recent screening on Turner Classic Movies, R.P.M. stars Anthony Quinn as Paco Perez, a professor trying to get down with the kids on a strife-torn California college campus. Always one to sympathize with his students, Paco finds himself thrust into a position of authority after activists take over the school's administration building. The Board of Trustees names him President because the kids trust him, but he finds some of their demands hard to comply with, raising the question: how much revolution is too much revolution? Ann-Margret co-stars as Paco's grad student mistress (surely grounds for dismissal?), Paul Winfield and Gary Lockwood agitate the masses, and--in brilliant casting--an uncredited S.I. Hayakawa (himself a veteran of a student sit-in at San Francisco State University) appears as a semantics instructor. Quinn is very good standing in for aging liberal director Stanley Kramer, who probably felt lost at sea during the radical late sixties, but the film's Achilles' Heel is Eric Segal's screenplay, which is generally (though not unremittingly) awful.
