This parable of anarchy and ambition at a Southern California high school is playful, cynical, maddening, and exhilarating: quintessentially sixties. Perennial teenager Roddy McDowall plays a sweetly diabolical fairy godfather to Tuesday Weld, who brings startling depth to her role as the girl who wants everything, from cashmere sweaters to Hollywood stardom. Harvey Korman and Ruth Gordon highlight a supporting cast of hopeless grown-ups ("Alan, how did we fail you?," one elder queries as McDowall tosses him into the air with a bulldozer). Writer-director George Axelrod wallows in his characters' crassness with a curdled humor; at many moments, including the notoriously lascivious father-daughter sweater-shopping scene (Dad goes wild for Periwinkle Pussycat!), you won't know whether to laugh or cringe. The movie has often been called ahead of its time, and its marriage of satiric and sordid is especially prescient-you might say this ungainly young duckling grew up to be a glossy American Beauty.-Juliet Clark