The finest film about America at the turn of the sixties was made by a Czech director. And it was his first English film.

It can be argued, of course, that he had to have been an outsider to endow the zeitgest with such objectivity, such perspective.

A simple runaway-girl story takes on ridiculously varied -- always funny, always unpredictable -- layers as her parents dip into the counterculture to hunt for her and emerge hunting for themselves instead. And all this while the daughter stands around waiting for her turn at a rock audition -- one the director intelligently keeps taking us back to.

The cast is constantly spot-on, and while the leads are great -- Lynn Carlin and a super Buck Henry play the parents to the runaway Linnea Heacock -- the real fun lies in the fringes.

The quirkier performances give the film its inimitable feel, the highlights being the varied audition singers (including a very young Carly Simon) and late actor Vincent Schiavelli, playing a junkie'd alter ego with the same name.

In this particularly phenomenal scene, the parental generation attempts to step into youthful shoes, trying on the trendiest misdemeanors of the time with the view to understanding their childrens' perspective.

To this end, they delve hilariously into some mild, 'particularly pure in form' illegality, aided by Mr Schiavelli. Click here for the video.

From the utter reversal of the authority figure to the theoretical, almost academic approach to an act considered anarchic and defiant, the above scene showing a group of adults indulging in marijuana may just be the best-ever capture of the generation gap, on film.

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