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1970 was a turbulent, confused year in America and that cultural craziness was reflected in the movies that Hollywood released at the start of a new decade.

The surprise success of a series of oddball 1960s movies — from “Blow-Up” in 1966 to “Bonnie & Clyde” the following year — paved the way for such 1969 sleeper hits as “Easy Rider” and “Midnight Cowboy.”

Hollywood knew that younger audiences wanted more realistic pictures like the European imports playing in U.S. art houses throughout the 1960s, but they didn’t want to completely turn off older moviegoers who were leary of profanity, nudity and gory violence.

The hits of the late 1960s made studio heads less nervous about releasing pictures that simply would not have been produced a decade earlier, so 1970 saw the release of such catering-to-youth pictures as “Zabriskie Point” and “Getting Straight,” both of which attempted to deal with campus unrest (and the nationally televised police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention).

The most interesting of the 1970 campus protest pictures “The Strawberry Statement” finally made its DVD debut earlier this month — via the Warner Archive division — and it’s a fascinating time capsule of the time in which it was made.

The movie was based on a 1969 non-fiction account of the campus unrest at Columbia University in the spring of 1968 but the school wanted no part of the MGM production so the film was shot in San Francisco (with a “campus” cobbled together from anonymous locations).

Bruce Davison stars as a jock on the university rowing team who is politicized by what he sees going on around him on the campus. He is also drawn in to the protest scene by a pretty activist coed played by Kim Darby.

Because the movie steered away from anti-Vietnam War politics and toward economic issues, it now resonates with the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, so it is not quite as dated as you might think (other than in terms of its fashions and music, of course).

“The Strawberry Statement” was an attempt at a topical youth picture — getting a 1968 story on the screen within two years — but it suffered from being released within a few weeks of the National Guard shootings on the campus of Kent State University that left four students dead.

The mood in the country shifted almost overnight — away from major campus protest gatherings and toward more individual forms of political expression — leaving audiences of all ages uninterested in a movie that tried to bottle the anti-Establishment passion of just a few months earlier.

The slick visual style of “The Strawberry Statement” — the director Stuart Hagmann came to movies from the world of TV commercials — also turned off the few young people who caught the movie in the spring of 1970.

The crowd that was expected to patronize the campus protest flicks instead flocked to the hugely successful spring, 1970, release of “Woodstock,” the epic Warner Bros. concert film that stressed sex, drugs and pop culture rather than the politics of the previous summer’s festival in upstate New York.

The only real impact made by “The Strawberry Statement” in 1970 was its popular soundtrack album which had great tunes by “Woodstock” stars Crosby, Stills, Nash and  Young and many other fine artists who were probably somewhat embarrassed by their connection to a project that had so quickly gone cold.

42 years later, “The Strawberry Statement” has gained considerable interest as a memento from a period when the large corporations that ran movie companies became so caught up in the anti-capitalist zeitgeist that they financed hate letters to themselves.