A Day With The Boys (Clu Gulager

What if Kenneth Anger took a crack at William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies?  It might look something like Clu Gulager‘s chilling meditation on boyhood—and manhood—A Day With The Boys.  As Vice’s Ryan McGinley says of the short:

There’s no dialogue, just marching music, which makes it seem kind of like a Vietnam allegory.  Legendary cinematographer László Kovácsreally makes this film what it is.  It’s so psychedelic—saturated with slow-motion sequences, solarization, and freeze-frames.  Images dissolve and bleed into one another and turn into paintings.  It’s a great example of super-creative late-60s avant-garde filmmaking.

Later that year, Kovács would achieve wider countercultural street cred with the release of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider.  But much like Charles Laughton after The Night Of The Hunter, Clu Gulager would never direct again.  He did, though, continue on as an actor in both film and television.  Random footnote: Clu’s son, John, was theSeason 3 winner of Project Greenlight.