SOURCE: Blake, Richard A. “Selective Memory.” America 140, no. 13 (7 April 1979): 286.

In the following excerpt, Blake commends Hair's atmosphere of “great good fun,” but cautions against the film's tendency to sanitize historical events.

Sanitizing the past is easier than living with ugly memories. Self-exoneration is, of course, a key motive for reshaping the past. Today, for example, people who admit they once admired Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against Communists (and, incidentally, the Constitution) are as rare as those who can recall their enthusiasm for stopping the Red menace in Vietnam. Everybody, it seems, was on the right side from the beginning. The practice of selective memory is harmless enough until it leads to self-delusion. Moreover, simplifying complex periods of history reduces movements to morality plays, and simplistic morality plays can be terribly hollow.

Hair, even without its famous nude scene, was an exciting, even shocking political statement...