The Year That Trembled, directed by Jay Craven, is about events in 1970 and their immediate aftermath. When the film begins, newsreel footage of President Richard Nixon attempts to justify the April 1970 bombing of Cambodia. The scene then shifts to Kent State University, where twenty-eight members of the National Guard wounded nine and killed four civilian and student protesters against the expansion of the war. The plot then concerns the lives of some of the twenty-five who were indicted later that year for conspiracy on the testimony of the ringleader, FBI undercover agent and Kent State University student Isaac Hoskins (played by Jay R. Ferguson). More attention focuses on Helen Kerrigan (played by Marin Hinkle), who is fired from her position as a teacher at nearby Chestnut Falls High School because of her support for the protest. Her husband Charlie (played by Jonathan M. Woodward), a law clerk for a state's attorney (played by Henry Gibson), discovers FBI involvement in the local grand jury indictment, but is not allowed by his boss to prosecute the FBI for conspiracy. Newsreels are interspersed as fillers between the scenes of the stories of personal tragedies. As an independent film, the sound quality is often poor, and the actors wear little if any makeup, as if to lend authenticity. There are no opening or closing titles attesting that the plot is based on a true personal story other than the bare facts about the protest and indictment. Instead, the film is based on the novel by Scott Lax. At the end of the film, by then the year 1971, two actors ask rhetorically whether what they did was worth anything. Yet in 1970 one of the characters said, "Maybe our kids won't have to fight." However, twenty years later that next generation fought in the Gulf War, with at least two more wars to come. MH

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The Year That Trembled
by Scott Lax

Lax ably depicts the randomness of the [Vietnam War] draft and mimics the familiar rhetoric of innocence that we associate with the Age of Aquarius, when "we listened more to new ideas, however sentimental or foolish they sound all these years later in the harsh light of the millennium's end.".