Getting Straight
1970 film by Richard Rush
Getting Straight is a 1970 American satirical and romantic comedy-drama motion picture directed by Richard Rush, released by Columbia Pictures.
The story centers upon student politics, protest, and relationships during the height of the counterculture era at a US university amid the turbulent times around the late 1960s, seen through the eyes of non-conformist graduate student Harry Bailey (Elliott Gould). Also featured in the cast were Candice Bergen as Bailey's girlfriend, Jeff Corey as Bailey's professor, Robert F. Lyons as his draft-avoiding friend Nick, and Harrison Ford as a fellow teaching student and his girlfriend's neighbor.
Getting Straight was released during an era of change and unrest in the United States in the late 1960s and early '70s, and was in a long line of films that dealt with these themes. Other films of this period with similar themes were Medium Cool (1969), R. P. M. (1970), and The Strawberry Statement (1970).
Plot
Harry Bailey, a former student activist, Vietnam War veteran, and graduate student, returns to college to complete a master's degree so he can become a teacher. He does his best to avoid the increasing student unrest that has surfaced at his university and in the country as a whole. However, he finds this difficult as his girlfriend, Jan, is a leader in these protests.
Over time, student demonstrations bring police to the campus to quell the unrest, and the ensuing clashes lead to a heavy police presence. Harry is forced to question his changing values.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Getting Straight” is 1970 film by Richard Rush. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Getting, Straight and film, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “1970 film by Richard Rush” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2311757. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Getting Straight” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.