Review of Rainbow Bridge

First of all, you have to give credit where its due - the late 60's/early 70's sure was a time when proper leftfield stuff was unleashed in the cinemas. This film now seems a wilfully uncommercial and bizarre effort and I'm pretty sure even back in the day it must have been somewhat oddball. It centres around the people who live at the Hawaii hippy commune called the Rainbow Bridge. But its very difficult to determine what is acting and what is documentary - it seems to be a bit of both, with the emphasis heavily on authentic chat but in effect this is non-actors acting themselves (if that makes any sense). For that reason, this movie improbably is a precursor for the reality TV shows 'The Only Way is Essex', 'Made in Chelsea' and 'Geordie Shore'; but instead of featuring Essex girls, Geordies or toffs talking garbage, this film does the same thing but with hippies talking gibberish, albeit about 40 years earlier! So, you do have to be forgiving of listening to an awful lot of waffle because 80% of the runtime compromises of chat about new age nonsense. After enduring a lot of this interminable - and often barely audible - drivel, Jimi Hendrix pitches up and knocks out a few tunes in an open-air concert populated by our hippy friends. The musical segment, needless to say, is the highlight of the film and unsurprisingly is the angle that the movie poster's homes in on as the chief selling point, made even more pertinent as this turned out to be Hendrix's last live concert, seeing as he unfortunately died two months later.

The upshot is that this remains an oddity which can be cautiously recommended. As a snapshot of the hippy counter-culture, it offers an interesting time-capsule; albeit, it would work better as background viewing, as opposed to sitting down and giving this your full concentration. The Hendrix material is great of course, but it does only constitute maybe 20mins or so of the overall runtime. So, hard going overall but it has its good points.