We’re talking about that byzantine time when Hollywood majors, reeling from the indie success of Easy Rider (1970), were throwing money at any movie claiming to have a finger on anti-establishment protest. That includes baloney like The Strawberry Statement (1970) and flawed but imposing works like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). And it’s the only reason Paul Williams’s dimwitted take on campus activism, The Revolutionary (1970), which is screening August 5 and 7 at the Harvard Film Archive, could have been greenlighted by United Artists.

The project started with screenwriter Hans Königsberger’s 1967 novel, which was situated not in get-out-of-Vietnam America but in an unnamed, abstract, turn-of-the-century European country. There, the estranged student protagonist called "A" ("It was perhaps because his name started with an ‘A,’ but certainly not from any attempt at secrecy") joins the Revolutionary Party and wrestles with the notion of bloodying himself for political change.

How the American scene has altered since the book’s pre–Me Generation era! The cover blurb for the 1970 Popular Library paperback assures us that this is "A Novel That Speaks for All Young Revolutionaries Today." Right on! However, those radical activists who saw the movie version in 1970 (not many, The Revolutionary was a box-office disaster) were surely enraged at being so miserably represented. Jon Voight’s "A" is an oaf, a mumbling, directionless boob. "A" for ass. The novel’s Raskolnikov breaks his leg when he’s pushed off a wall by a fascist browncoat. Voight’s clownish "A" has slipped and fallen at a demonstration. A banana-peel insurgent.

Hot off Midnight Cowboy (1969), Voight cools down as this apple-cheeked lost soul meandering about in a Salvation Army–style raincoat. Unable to communicate with an ungiving dad (Warren Stanhope), a tweedy WASP enwrapped in his newspaper, "A" finds alternative father figures in the hazy left-wing underworld: a Marxist labor-unionist (Robert Duvall) and a shaggy-moustached, violence-prone anarchist (Seymour Cassel). In the meantime, he walks out on his student political group, abandons his hippie chick (Collin Wilcox Paxton), and takes up with a naive rich girl (Jennifer Salt). He’s a flake who, though his ideology is a muddle, finds time to paint on a wall, "Capitalism is a carnivorous flower."

At the end, this messed-up young man stands outside a building with dynamite in his briefcase, pondering whether to blow up a supposed class enemy who will soon exit. What does he do? The conclusion is as frustrating as everything else in this movie. Too bad The Revolutionary is not a better artifact of the late 1960s, especially since Harvard is unveiling its own virginal print, a 35mm beauty that seems to have been donated years ago to the Archive by the filmmaker himself.

Who is Paul Williams? I don’t know much. He might have gone to Harvard. He made a previous movie with Jon Voight, Out of It (1968); afterward, he directed low-budget works, including Nunzio (1978). The Williams movie I’d most like to see brought back is Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972), a marijuana-running cross-country road trip from a novel by "Michael Douglas," actually Michael Crichton.

THERE’S FAR MORE to Paul Newman than a half-century of sterling acting and salad dressing. Twice he’s proved his mettle as a film director, in an engrossing adaptation of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and, before that, in a sincere "woman’s picture," Rachel, Rachel (1968). The latter, which features Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, as a virginal mid-30s schoolteacher trapped in a stultifying small town and living with her dotty mother (Kate Harrington), plays August 6 and 8 at the Harvard Film Archive.

Screenwriter Stewart Stern (Rebel Without a Cause) mostly sticks close to A Jest of God, whose author, Margaret Laurence, was Canada’s most popular pre–Margaret Atwood female novelist. Set outside Winnipeg, Laurence’s story has a Canadian specificity, especially in the almost-forbidden across-the-tracks romance of Rachel, who’s from a proper Scots family, and Nick Kazlik, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. The movie takes place somewhere in America, and the background of the lovers is irrelevant. What remains from the book is Rachel’s somewhat plodding journey to a shaky freedom and her discovery of her self-worth.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com