Aug. 30 – (EDITOR’S NOTE — The movie “Manson” now playing at the Esquire Theater here, has been “banned in California at the complaint of ‘Squeaky Fromme,” according to advertisements.)

Robert Hendrickson’s documentary, “Manson,” was shown at the Cannes Film Festival but has had only limited exposure in the U.S.

In the film Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, an urban guerrilla in hot-pants, caresses a bolt-action rifle and fondles a crescent-bladed knife as she and Sandra Good and a third Family girl profess their loyalty to the convicted Charlie and his ideas.

“Manson” has a real and terrible fascination. Hendrickson, a sometime actor and writer, had apparently made contact with the Manson Family in its early Spahn Ranch days, even before the Tate-LaBianca murders. Some of the footage, which has an amateurish, home-movie look, seems to date from those days. George Spahn himself, 80 and blind, shuffles along on the flattering arms of some of the Manson girls.

Hendrickson lived with the Family for several months, including a period after the murders, when the interviews with Squeaky Fromme and the other girls were photographed. The ranch film is a relatively small portion of the 85-minute documentary, but it was obviously the reason for it, and it does provide a revealing insight to the life-style and the mentality of Charlie and his followers.

For the rest of it, “Manson” offers a long and melodramatic monologue by prosecutor Vincent T. Bugliosi, delivered in the courtroom where the trial took place, coverage around the trial, including shots of Manson in transit to and from court, and some energetic graphics. The doom-voiced narration is closer to The Untouchables than to 60 Minutes, which is to say that it does not add much perspective.

The narrative does repeat the most frequently asked question: How did these nice solid middle-class children, the girls particularly, fall in with the slight, emotionally crippled outcast son of an unmarried teenaged prostitute?

The narrative offers no answer, but there seem to be clues in the film. The followers you see and hear look in their ways as much like losers as Manson himself drawn not so much by a promise of family warmth as by a childish dream of perpetual disobedience and uncensored pleasure. The steamy fantasies of limitless sex and self-indulgence were offered as realities in a play world from which remorse, responsibility and consequences had been removed. It was an escape, not a rebellion, and the trappings of revolution in the SLA or Black Panther sense never really fit because the Family’s only real cause seems to have been Manson’s private fight against a world he never sought and which has never wanted him.

The acned and pouting inadequates found their loony lord of the fillies and they played their deadly games, spilling lives instead of their oatmeal and with as little passion. The constraints that help define normal men and women seem to have been etched away as in a bath of acid. And so does any capacity for thought or feeling. (The film invites glum speculations about the effects of continued heavy drug use.)

The horror of the talk in “Manson” is that it is the prattling of not very bright children.

With unintended irony, a musician who dropped out of the Family says, “Charlie talked about love all the time. But Charlie was so far from love it wasn’t even funny.”

By CHARLES CHAMPLIN