By Scott Ross
I’m not sure I can express my admiration for Warren Beatty as a creative force in American movies briefly and succinctly so I hope you will permit me a personal privilege, because that veneration is nearly without bounds and has bearing on my attitudes toward Shampoo which he originated, co-wrote, produced and starred in. And if what follows seems wholly personal, that’s because it is. There is no such thing as objective criticism; all passion is personal, and what we love, like what we loathe, in art as in anything else, inevitably reveals a great deal about ourselves.
Although I remember watching and enjoying $ on television in my early adolescence my first exposure to Beatty as a creative artist (that is, as opposed to “merely” as an actor) and in a movie theater, came when I was 17… a not so very good year, in fact a largely terrible one, with compensations, most of them at the movies. And the romantic comedy/fantasy Heaven Can Wait (1978), in which Beatty starred, and which he wrote (with Elaine May) and co-directed (with Buck Henry) was a movie almost calculated to get under the skin of a film-besotted teenager.
First, the picture had a lightness of touch bracingly at odds with the slobby, crass comedy we generally got at the movies then. Great movie comedy has often thrived in uncertain times, so you might have thought the ‘70s would have produced some. But aside from one-offs such as Harold and Maude (1971), some of the Woody Allen and Mel Brooks pictures, or rare gems like The Hot Rock (1972), What’s Up, Doc? (also 1972) Peter Bogdanovich’s variation on Bringing Up Baby, the still hilarious 1975 and ‘76 Blake Edwards Pink Panther entries, the beautiful James Goldman-scripted They Might Be Giants (1971), the Larry Gelbart/Carl Reiner collaboration Oh, God! (1977) or oddball items, often tampered with and ruined during production, like the almost-wonderful Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976) and The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) or the surprisingly charming Frank Gilroy romance From Noon to Three (1976), and even if we stretch the meaning of the word to include character studies like the Robert Altman California Split (1974), not so much comic as just a terrific picture with some deft touches and funny lines, it was dismal period for movie comedy, and had been for years. Despite the manifold miracles being wrought in American pictures during that period, if there are seminars or, worse, doctoral theses, devoted to that evergreen “The Classic 1970s Movie Comedy,” I don’t know of them, and don’t want to. It’s no wonder that college students in the late ‘60s were turning on to the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields: Not only were they anarchic and anti-establishment before The Establishment had been named, they were, even better, funny. What did the kids in 1970 have to laugh at, aside from the Robert Altman MASH, which was anyway under its comic veneer (and if this isn’t an oxymoron) a sardonic cri de couer against the war in Vietnam? And the ‘70s proper were even worse: Nixon, Kissinger, Chile, Cambodia, Watergate, Ford, the Church Committee hearings and — as if we hadn’t been punished enough — streaking, disco, disaster movies and Jimmy Carter.
Second, Heaven Can Wait was also deeply, if on the surface almost casually, romantic. Other than Annie Hall — which I adored at 16 and which doesn’t seem so terrific today… although that may be less a reflection on the movie itself than of how repulsive I now find Woody Allen’s screen persona — there hadn’t been a great romantic comedy in so long that if you were searching for a representative title you almost had to go back to The Apartment in 1960, Irma La Douce in 1963, The Americanization of Emily in 1964, or Avanti! in 1972. (Can you name another?)* Its screenplay, beautifully poised between reality and the purely fantastic, and stuffed with characters whose assorted idiosyncrasies almost define the word “quirky,” had a point of view, something that smelled suspiciously like a genuinely leftist critique of rapacious capitalism, or at least of its excesses, and which also spoke to the frustrated alienation I felt from traditional liberal politics, then as now more enamored with the status quo than with effecting actual change, and all too smugly satisfied with itself. And it looked wonderful; William A. Fraker’s diffused images had a soft-focus patina, perfectly augmented by the imaginative staging and editing. It sounded good too; Dave Grusin, although seldom capable of delivering a great full score except in some of his comedies like Divorce American Style, is nonetheless a master at themes. For Heaven Can Wait, he came up with a charming little recurrent march scored with soprano sax, an apt choice since Beatty’s character fancies he can play that instrument (he can’t) and which gracefully segues into a gentle, rhapsodic love theme. The music was of a piece with the movie’s essential sweetness, a sunniness of disposition that, in those sour times, was invigorating — a tonic.
Third, the picture was wonderfully cast: Julie Christie, James Mason — a particular favorite of my youth, and even more so now he’s gone — Dyan Cannon, Charles Grodin, Jack Warden, Vincent Gardenia, Dolph Sweet and Buck Henry, with Joseph Maher, Hamilton Camp and Arthur Malet as a trio of delightfully unflappable servants. But as much as I loved them all, Beatty in the lead was the revelation. Aside from his personal charm, or even his breathtaking physical beauty (and he was among the most beautiful and desirable men I’d ever seen on a big movie screen) his understatement as an actor, which could pull you forward in your seat, alternated with a rapid-fire rhetorical style, ideas seeming to pour out of him in every direction, some eminently clearheaded and others just this side of Bellevue; it all somehow coalesced not merely into coherent thought but some rough form of utter sanity that almost felt like genius. I was absolutely dazzled.
That verbal and intellectual integrity is a Beatty hallmark, as I came to understand when Reds was released in 1981. It seems an outward expression of his restless, questing brain; when you see him in one of his rare interviews, the concepts pile up behind his words and tumble out in a stream-of-consciousness that can be, at times, a bit exhausting but is never, as it might be with almost anyone else, boring or self-aggrandizing. Nor is it in any manner inarticulate, or pretentious; as with Marlon Brando (another exceptionally thoughtful man whom the surface-oriented regarded as a kook) what Beatty says has clearly been considered, and over a long period — years, and probably decades. The sort of intelligence he evinces is rare, and it goes with his commitment to leftist politics (he was in the McGovern “inner circle” in 1972, and a key fundraiser, although more radical than his candidate) but it’s more than the sort of hip Hollywood window-dressing so easily dismissed as trendy “Look at me!” dilettantism. It’s genuinely subversive, and in the healthiest way. Probably only Warren Beatty could have gotten Gulf & Western to pony up an eventual $40 million for a kaleidoscopic paean to American Communists, and God alone knows how he managed to convince 20th Century-Fox to commit to Bulworth (1998), very likely the sharpest and most brazenly honest political satire ever produced in this country. Some even claim the picture was never officially “green-lit,” with Beatty hustling the various studio departments so effectively no one knew what was going on until it was too late and the picture was halfway completed. Surely that is apocrypha but it speaks so well to both Warren Beatty’s reputation, and to his sly wit I hope it’s true.
Reds meant more to me than almost any movie of my young manhood aside from Norma Rae and All That Jazz; I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing on that screen — the Russian Revolution, presented not as the usual disaster of conservative and liberal American fantasy, but as an arguably necessary corrective even if it quickly went sour† — and I went to the picture over and over while it was playing, and on its reissue after the 1982 Oscars, at which Beatty won as Best Director. (I would have used the modifier “improbably” for Beatty’s win, given the subject matter of his movie, but one must remember that actors make up the largest voting bloc of the Academy, and they always respond favorably when one of their own proves he can do something other than act.) Unlike with Annie Hall, I am entirely unembarrassed by my youthful ardor for Reds; even if the all-heterosexual romanticism of it is belied by the facts of both John Reed’s life and Louise Bryant’s, its exuberance as a movie, its intelligent spirit, its exhilarating editorial dash, its epic sweep and the crucial intimacy of the interviews with its “Witnesses,” its heady embrace of radical politics — its sheer effrontery — do not dissipate with time. If anything, Reds looks better with the passing of the years, especially given the artistic timidity, overwhelming neoliberalism and nearly complete corporatism of American movies (and life) in the 21st century.
Ideas, of course, are never enough; only an academic or a pretentious ass goes to a movie because of how it expresses its ideas. Everything Beatty produces — with the exception, I suppose, of Dick Tracy, which in any case was more pure, trivial fun than any other comic book or comic strip movie — is about people. As Faulkner famously noted, “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself” are the only things that make good writing “because only that is worth writing about.” Even good, silly comedy (like great, witty comedy) originates, not just in conflict, the basic building block of drama, but in the essential clash between desire and consideration. Warren Beatty’s movies as a producer, a writer, a writer/director, or a director of other people’s scripts are, without exception, concerned with both ideas and with human beings. I wouldn’t be such a fool as to idolize Beatty as a man. I don’t know him, and in any case, reactive hero-worship lies, I believe, at the root of most of our collective woes; when you imbue a candidate for office with the kind of unthinking passion that fuels sports or matinee idol fandom (those provenances of adolescence which, alas, carry over into far too many adults’ physical maturity) you shut off your ability to think. It’s all mindless cheering. As a creative man, however, Beatty has few peers, and along with his radical political viewpoint and his well-documented penchant for dithering, his interest in what is of vital concern to people has probably limited his options just as similar concerns limited those of Orson Welles. In the current creative sphere (I won’t say “artistic,” because to have that you must also actually have art) the problems of human beings are at best a tertiary concern after ever-more-elaborate special effects and turning on with mindless drivel the vast subliterate Asian population that constitutes the true audience for American movies.
Having heroes, at least still clinging to them when one is past the early age of accountability, is a dangerous delusion. I’ve long since ceased hero-worshiping Warren Beatty as my 20-year-old self once did, but I don’t mind in the least citing him as a creative touchstone. The passion he brings to his obsessions is as remarkable, and as important, as his rigorous intelligence, especially at a time when artistic obsession is equated with the adapting of hit movies of the past into Broadway musicals or animated cartoons into live action, and political passion consists mostly of holding supportive marches for whichever elderly psychopath has most recently contradicted Donald Trump.
In the 1980s it was said, often, that the former hairdresser, later movie producer and (with Peter Guber) eventual studio head Jon Peters was the inspiration for George Roundy, Beatty’s character in Shampoo, and it’s vaguely possible Beatty may have been aware of or even met him; Jay Sebring, horrifically murdered with Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger, was surely a more likely model for George, as was Jack Sahakian. But that Beatty had been thinking about the movie for years is evidenced by his original title for it — Hair — which places its origins, at the very least in 1967, if not earlier, probably around the time he was putting Bonnie and Clyde together and before “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” opened Off-Broadway. Beatty appears to have resurrected the idea after Robert Towne (and, one presumes, his weirdly silent writing partner Edward Taylor)‡ contributed revisions to the 1973 The Parallax View. The delay between mid-‘60s conceptualization and mid-1970s realization worked in Beatty’s favor; setting Shampoo on the eve of the 1968 Presidential election gives the picture a melancholic undertone and makes its social critique all the more potent: As Jack Kennedy’s murder was the moment the unseen powers took over, Nixon’s election signified the death of hope.
That the political implications are nearly all beneath the surface is one of the hallmarks of Shampoo’s subtlety as a movie, and its faith in its audience. That’s another difference between 1975 and now, and between Beatty and almost everyone else working in mainstream American movies. There’s a moment near the end of the first half of Reds in which Beatty as Jack Reed makes an impassioned, impromptu speech before a hall of working-class Bolsheviks and is greeted with cheers. Beatty the director repeatedly cuts from Beatty the actor, reveling in the sudden acclimation (and his own passion) to Diane Keaton as Reed’s wife Louise: At first she seems intently interested, then pleased; finally, as the crowd’s enthusiasm peaks and she is unable physically to reach her husband, concerned. It’s the moment Louise realizes that Jack’s journalistic advocacy might be tipping over into obsessive political activism. The way her face clouds is a signal, and Beatty (along with Trevor Griffiths, his co-author) is too bright and too accomplished to come out and tell you in words exactly what it means. Beatty trusts us to get it, just as in Shampoo he doesn’t find it necessary for George to protest at the suspicions of some of the other characters about his sexuality. George knows who he is, sexually, and so do the various women he’s involved with; he doesn’t need to strut and proclaim. And Beatty — as with Towne (and Edwards) and Hal Ashby, the movie’s director — assumes we understand that.§
None of the characters in Shampoo is remotely interested in politics. The only one who gives the pretense that he is, the wonderfully named Lester Karpf (Jack Warden), reveals himself to George late in the picture as being for his own reasons as disgusted with Nixon as with Johnson, but hosts an election-returns party in an upstairs room at The Bistro to woo dedicated Republican money-men who do care who wins. As much as George, if in a different way, Lester is an old hand at the game of seduction, and the filmmakers (again, without comment) contrast this with George’s abortive attempt to apply for a bank loan to set up his own hairdressing shop: George has so little understanding of business that, when asked by George Furth’s loan manager for references, all he can offer is, “I do Barbara Rush,” and when Furth proves resistant, to insult him, storm out of the bank and kick a trash receptacle in impotent rage. It isn’t that Furth’s character isn’t asking for it. He’s quietly smug and dismissive and George is probably saying aloud what countless loan applicants would like to. But Lester, even a penniless Lester, would have schmoozed the man, stroked his ego — charmed him. George has ambitions, but few means of achieving them, and absolutely no idea how. He’s curiously passive, seldom acting, nearly always reacting. And, interestingly, it’s only when George is in despair that he is fully articulate, as when he explains his seeming priapism to Lester, or admits to Goldie Hawn’s Jill that he can’t seem to “get out of [his] own way.” He isn’t stupid, but he’s more apt to speak in meaningless generalizations than with conviction, as when he tells Jill she’s “great.” This gets a subtle echo a few scenes later when George’s ex Jackie (Julie Christie) says he’s “great” and Jill responds, “Yeah… George is great.” This sounds like dumb, empty late-‘60s platitudinizing, but the way Hawn says the line, and the look on her face, suggests Jill is trying to convince herself.
George and Lester are almost ironic mirror images in the picture, and although they are strangers to each other until well into the movie’s running time, their lives are intimately intertwined: George is the occasional lover of Lester’s bored, angry hausfrau Felicia (Lee Grant) while Lester is keeping Jackie as an expensive mistress. (Indeed, it’s Felicia who suggests to Lester that he ought to finance George’s dream of having his own salon.) It’s a classic farce set-up — there’s even a lover-hiding-in-the-closet sequence when George and Jackie begin making love in her bathroom after he’s cut her hair for the Bistro party and Lester arrives ahead of schedule, forcing them to improvise — but Beatty and his collaborators are too bright to let their sex-farce exist at a superficial level.
Lester may be a liar, but he isn’t a villain. If there’s a true hypocrite in the mix, it’s Felicia (note the ironic name). She’s so brazen about her infidelity that when she greets George at the Bistro she kisses him in such a showy, blatantly sexual manner they both might as well be naked. Yet when it becomes obvious to her that Lester is involved with Jackie — she seems to know but won’t admit it until she has no choice, until Jackie attempts to fellate George under the table, and Lester intervenes — she’s livid. She isn’t just angry at Lester; she’s incensed at anyone else being intimate with George. By contrast, when Lester later comes upon George and Jackie fucking in an empty pool-house, his ultimate decision is not to divest himself of his mistress but to marry her. Further, while he’s far from happy with George over what he’s seen, he forgives him. Even his (for him, natural) aversion to George, whom he believes for most of the movie is “a fairy” merely because he cuts women’s hair, is expressed with a shrug. He’s still willing to consider backing George in setting up shop for himself, and remains so even after he stumbles upon George in flagrante delicto with Jackie. There is a funny moment when Lester grips George’s arm affectionately, as he might with any other man, and immediately backs off; accepting George is a “fairy” and actually touching the fairy are obviously, for him, two entirely different things. This has a rhyme later in the picture, when George touches Lester’s hair in a professional way and Lester looks panicked, as if George is coming on to him. On the other hand, while he and Jackie are trying to keep Lester out of the bathroom after he’s nearly caught them, George isn’t above playing to Lester’s sexual phobias by suddenly shouting at him in a slightly queeny way.
For all his financial hustling, his cheating on his wife, and even the empty consumerist acquisition he represents, Lester is, with Goldie Hawn’s Jill, one of the two most likable characters in the picture. When, at a much funkier party than the one at the Bistro a naked boy calls to him to join the skinny-dipping and Lester seems about to, we’re pleasantly surprised by an adventurousness we didn’t think he was capable of. (Of course, that a naked girl is encouraging him as well is the deciding factor.) Later, when Lester indicates George to his bodyguards and tells them not to be too rough, there’s a stomach-tightening moment when we, like George, don’t know he’s joking. The cinephile’s brain automatically reaches back to the horrible end of Sweet Smell of Success when we know Tony Curtis is going to be “chastised” by the crooked cops, possibly to death, and for a moment we’re too stunned to laugh. Yet Lester, however bluff or assured he seems to be, is as riddled with insecurity as anyone else. “I just wish I knew what the hell I was living for,” he says to George the morning after the election. “You can lose it all, you know? I mean, you can lose it no matter who you are. What’s the sense of having it all?” That may be an easier question to ask when you do have it all, but the utterance is still a lot more than we normally expect from the cuckold, or the other man, in a sex-farce. Additionally, although it’s Lester who’s worried, his words (“You can lose it all”) are more prophetic for George than he he has any way of knowing.
Shampoo is one of those odd comedies that don’t necessarily make you laugh while you’re watching it but which may cause you to chuckle when you remember lines and scenes from it later. That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny; Shaw is among the wittiest of all playwrights but when I see Pygmalion I don’t laugh all that often at it either. Zuleika Dobson is comic, too, but it’s not especially funny. (Osbert Lancaster’s watercolor illustrations for it are funnier than the book.) Laughter by itself is not necessarily the final arbiter of whether a verbal or situational comedy is successful as it is, say, of physical humor — of a Keaton picture, or one by Chaplin or Blake Edwards. There’s so much going on in the movie, so many shrewd, understated observations being made, that in a way they militate against easy laughter, at least until you know it better. (After four viewings in two years Shampoo seems much funnier to me now. The fact that I’ve watched any movie that often in so brief a period certainly says something for it.) While its bleak ending is fully prepared for, it can still catch you off-guard. Your response to that may depend on how you look at movies: If you need your main characters heroic, and triumphant, and your comedy buoyant, Shampoo will certainly disappoint you. Because of his over-commented upon love life, all too many people conflated Beatty with the role he performs in the picture, but he considered George, as Jill calls him, a loser. “I thought of my character as someone who couldn’t perform,” he said. Beatty didn’t mean sexually: “He was exhausted, out of gas.” George is juggling too many lovers — in addition to seeing Jackie and Felicia and Jackie’s best friend Jill, he’s stringing Jill along when, as he tells Jackie, he can’t imagine being with her at 50. (He also has it off with Felicia’s teenage daughter Lorna, played by Carrie Fisher, at her instigation, but that’s as much a function of Lorna’s hatred for her mother as it is of George’s priapism.) Still, as George tells Lester near the end of the picture, “As long as I can remember, when I see a pretty girl and I go after her and I make her, it’s like I’m gonna live forever.” But what happens when you’re 50, or 60, and the women aren’t responding any longer as they once did? Forever seems less and less attainable.
It’s a function of George’s fecklessness that he cannot see either Jill’s emotional attachment to him or her real qualities. On the Criterion Blu-ray of Shampoo, Mark Harris, in conversation with Frank Rich, asserts that Jill floats in and out of the action, as if she’s incidental and Rich says, “She often turns up just when you want the movie to move forward.”¶ I disagree entirely. Even more than Jackie, Jill is the living embodiment of George’s inability to commit to anything, or anyone. It’s what lost him Jackie to begin with, and what will lose her a second time; before George can make up his mind he needs her Lester has already proposed, and she’s accepted. (Ironically, it’s George who tamps down Lester’s anger at Jackie for “cheating” with him, dissuading Lester from thinking of her as a whore over a single act of infidelity to her married lover.) Jill continually shows that she relies on George, but he doesn’t want her to; he tells Jackie that Jill “needs to be with someone who can take care of her.” Unable to decide whether to take the modeling job abroad offered to her by the commercial director played by Tony Bill, Jill asks George whether she should. It isn’t that she needs his advice; she wants to know whether he can bear for her to be away so long. Tellingly, George’s mind is so peripatetic, so unable to concentrate thought, that when Jill comes to him to ask his advice on the job he doesn’t hear a word she’s said. “Where you goin’?” he asks, genuinely puzzled. “Egypt!” she snaps incredulously. But Jill isn’t entirely passive, and she’s a lot more perceptive than George realizes. When, after his disastrous encounter with the bank loan manager he tells her he’s “trying to get things moving” she snaps, “Oh, grow up! You never stop moving! You never go anywhere!” (Hilariously, Hawn follows this up by screaming, as a child might, “Grow up, grow up!”) By the end of the movie, George might still have a shot at Lester’s financial backing, but he will have lost both Jackie and Jill.
Shampoo is full of such beautiful contradictions, as well as of irony. Just as the Richard Sylbert-designed home sets in the movie feature huge picture windows to let in the sunlight while none of the characters (other than George, whose mode of transportation is a motorcycle) spends any time outside, the war in Vietnam, which was rending the social fabric of the rest of the nation in 1968 and which to a large degree helped propel Richard Nixon into the White House, causes no ripples in the lives of these self-absorbed figures. The only times it does are when the salon worker Mary (Ann Weldon) talks to George about her son’s recent promotion (we see his photo on the wall) and, later, when the soldier son of George’s employer Norman (Jay Robinson) is killed, ironically not in battle but in a highway accident. Here too sexuality becomes an interesting, understated (indeed, un-commented upon) aspect of the picture. As played by Robinson, Norman is rather obviously gay but whether or not he is, or was, married to the boy’s mother is left to speculation. The revelation of Norman’s even having a son (earlier we’ve seen the soldier’s photo displayed on Norman’s desk and may have assumed he was a younger lover) would probably cause Lester Karpf some sleepless nights, but it’s of a piece with the filmmakers’ relaxed attitudes on the subject. Even when Lorna suggests to George that his appreciation of older women is “faggoty,” she doesn’t say the word with any hostility. She’s curious about the man, for her own reasons; like her father, she can’t conceive of a heterosexual man being a hairdresser. Unlike Lester, however, Lorna is attracted to George, so her interest in the question of his sexuality isn’t academic. And with Lorna too comes another fascinating contradiction: She tells George she hates Felicia, and we sense she does (don’t all teenagers hate their mothers at some point?) and that her loathing extends to having it off with her mother’s lover. She fucks George — at least, that’s the implication when Felicia comes home and George is using Lorna’s bathroom — and holds up her head defiantly, directly challenging her mother with her transgression. She doesn’t seem pleased by her dalliance with George, or relaxed, or flushed by recent sexual activity. Sex with her mother’s lover is just one more little act of petulant adolescent insubordination. On the other hand, when George exits the bath, Lorna instantly lowers her eyes. Perhaps there is, for her, a thin line between loathing and embarrassment.
Shampoo is one of those movies that is so perfectly cast you can’t imagine the roles with anyone other than the actors playing the characters. (Anyway you’re so engaged by them, and what they’re saying and doing, the thought likely never occurs even to you.) Lee Grant was, in the mid-1960s, still working through the marginalization that resulted from her blacklisting in 1952 and until Shampoo was never as prominent as she should have been all along. She’d gotten a well-deserved Academy Award nomination as Joyce, Beau Bridges’ obnoxious rich-bitch mother in The Landlord (1970), Hal Ashby’s debut as a director, and her performance as Felicia, which won the Supporting Actress Oscar, is the flip side of that character, bitter where Joyce was anxious and needy where she was serenely oblivious. Her hypocrisy — probably a good part of the reason her daughter despises her — is breathtaking: She shares George’s bed whenever she can, but her anger is made incandescent by Lester’s involvement with Jackie, and Grant never makes a play for our sympathies, or even our fondness. Warden got a nomination too (and would also be nominated for his marvelous comic performance as Beatty’s coach in Heaven Can Wait) and he never sets a foot wrong or telegraphs his intentions.
Goldie Hawn was such a sunny, likable presence in movies of the period that I think (like the character she plays in Shampoo) her abilities weren’t appreciated, and it took a long time for her to shed her image as the giggly girl from “Laugh-In” who couldn’t get through a bit without breaking up. It was as endearing as Lily Tomlin playing Edith Ann or Ruth Buzzi’s Gladys Ormphby but, because it was natural and not character-driven, didn’t really hint at what she was capable of. The Oscar she got for the 1969 Cactus Flower must have surprised a lot of people but Hawn is such an adorable bundle of sexy innocence she’s the best thing in the picture; she makes the cliché of the kooky mistress something altogether fresh. If her role as Jill is smaller than we might like — and although the actress found it thin it’s difficult to see where it could have been expanded without overburdening the narrative, and the running-time — her impact is no less potent. Hawn makes it clear that, whatever her silly neuroses, Jill is sexy and fun, and that if George had less of a roving eye he might be able to see what he has in Jill instead of viewing her as a pleasurable impediment to some sort of future he can’t even see clearly, much less attain.
If Julie Christie’s performance is a bit harder to come to grips with, that’s because Jackie is almost unfathomable as a character, and as a woman. That’s not to say the characterization is false, merely that it’s difficult to define: Highly physically desirable, Jackie has no discernable interest in anything. She seems to exist to be objectified, either by George, her ex-boyfriend, or Lester, her wealthy lover. At least George has ambitions, even if he’s ill-equipped to realize them; Jackie doesn’t really know what, if anything, she actually wants, other than creature comforts, like the house Lester has given her or her horrible, yapping little dogs. To surrender yourself as Christie does so completely to such an essentially vapid character is deeply impressive. It could be argued that Jackie is Diana Scott in Darling (for which Christie was given the 1965 Best Actress Oscar) updated, but without even the modeling career — in Shampoo, it’s Jill who is the professional model — just the men. We don’t know what Jackie does with her time, to keep boredom (or madness?) at bay. No wonder she starts pursuing George again, even when she knows he’s no good for her. There’s something dead at her center, and Christie has a chillingly blank look except when she’s being touched — when George is making love to her, or even just paying attention to her hair. Christie is funny as well, in a riotously bitchy way, when she gets roaring drunk at the election night Bistro party, especially when she tells the old letch beside her (played by the shlock movie producer William Castle) what she really wants to do, to Beatty, and slides under the table to do it. Shampoo may not have been the first American movie comedy to acknowledge that there was such a thing as oral sex, but it was probably the first to call it by its name. (It’s also the first picture I know of since Harold Lloyd gave his fun-house mirror reflection the finger in the 1928 Speedy to have a major character use the gesture.) Although there is very little nudity in the movie its language about sex, and its frankness generally, were shocking to many in the mid-1970s, refreshing to others and immediately influential, the way John Schuck’s ad-lib during the football game in MASH (“All right, Bub, your fuckin’ head’s comin’ right off”) was to movies after 1970.#
Shampoo begins with a pitch-black screen, unidentifiable sounds gradually resolving themselves as human beings engaged in the sexual act. I imagine, in our auteurist age, that this has been ascribed to Hal Ashby, the movie’s director, but it’s in the Towne/(Taylor)/Beatty screenplay, one of the sharpest and canniest of its era. (Naturally, Leonard Maltin’s movie guide describes Shampoo as “dreary.” If it had a French name and subtitles he’d have pissed all over himself about it.) While much of the on-screen dialogue appears to have been improvised around what was written, it was written; the contours of the lines are largely the same, but the verbal shapes are slightly different — just as wonky but more spontaneous. There are lines in the picture that don’t show up in the screenplay, however, and they’re often illuminating, as when Jackie tells Jill how nice it is to wake up in the morning and know the rent is paid, or when George tells her that the telephone company has cut off his service so he can’t make outgoing calls. This may or may not be true (he lies constantly, to all of the women in his life) but if it is, nods toward his fecklessness and irresponsibility. Beatty also gets off a pair of barbs, not in the script, at Jackie’s expense that cut to how he feels about her being Lester’s mistress. The first is peripheral, when he comments that her hair style makes her “look like a hooker.” It does. (Those lousy up-teased 1960s bouffant hairdos always made women look like simpering fools or worse.) The wounding line is when in response to her criticisms of him he snaps, “I don’t fuck anybody for money. I do it for fun.” Probably the best line in the movie is also not in the script, but is overheard in the salon George works in and perfectly, hilariously, codifies a certain type of Los Angeles pretension: An unidentified female voice exclaiming, “Roscoe, I do not believe what you are saying to me. That was the purest comment that I have ever made!”
If what one reads about this movie as well as Bonnie & Clyde is true (and Lee Grant seconds some of it in her memoirs) Beatty the producer was often hell on his directors, and even his co-stars. On Shampoo he tended to emasculate the gentle Hal Ashby, who seems to me the perfect filmmaker for a picture like this one. Ashby observed the people in his best movies with amusement as well as pity but never maliciously or with condescension. He frames the empty, self-absorbed characters in Shampoo with a certain wry detachment, the way he did the people in The Landlord, The Last Detail and Harold and Maude, yet there is nothing dry or academic about the look of the movie, which is burnished by László Kovács’ superb, richly colored cinematography. It would have been so easy to have cynically depicted these selfish people running around screwing up each other’s lives with a flashiness equal to their essential emptiness and lack of self-fulfillment. Beatty and Towne (and Taylor) didn’t, and neither did Ashby. When, at the end, George is left with little but the taste of the ashes in his mouth, Ashby and Beatty do not stoop to making sport of him. Lesser talents would have made their sense of superiority to the character as obvious as the L.A. smog hanging over the scene as George watches Lester and Jackie drive away. Hacks would likewise have invited the audience to feel superior toward him as well. Artists on the other hand understand instinctively when enough is already too much, and don’t feel they have to put a solid leaden period on everything. They don’t mind being elliptical — yet another aspect that separates the American filmmaking of Shampoo‘s era from that of our own.
“Dreary,” my ass.
*The 1970 The Owl and the Pussycat was a comedy, and ultimately romantic, but while frequently hilarious it’s so dark and abrasive it often feels as decayed as the New York City in which it takes place. The enormously popular The Goodbye Girl (1977) despite Marsha Mason’s wonderful performance wasn’t great, just Neil Simon-wisecrack-happy.
†The Revolution’s origins are also murky, as are the rise of National Socialism in Germany 20 years later, since it seems the same banks and families that bankrolled Marx (and Lenin and Trotsky) also backed Herr Hitler.
‡See Sam Wasson’s Chinatown book The Big Goodbye. Beatty, like Towne, Jack Nicholson and Roman Polanski, was a friend of the Paramount production chief Robert Evans, and indeed Shampoo was originally slated as a Paramount release, to be produced by Evans. It feels like an Evans picture: Smart, funny, sharp, satirical, and a little sad.
§This admirable restraint contrasts sharply with Beatty’s earlier refusal to make Clyde Barrow either homosexual, as Clyde likely was, or, as the screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman intended, have him engage in a ménage with Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie and Michael J. Pollard’s C.W. Moss; it was Beatty who insisted on the insertion of Clyde’s line to Bonnie about his seeming asexuality, “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me — I don’t like boys,” and he was obviously just as reticent to depict John Reed as bisexual. In the case of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty told Benton and Newman it was needlessly complicated, and that they couldn’t risk alienating the audience’s affection for these two bank robbing killers by suggesting they were also deviants. With Reds, he likely reminded Griffiths they were already making a movie about a pair of Communists; they couldn’t show them as sexually fluid as well. There’s always an excuse to placate an actor’s fears, or indulge his vanity.
¶Rich also claims, on no evidence, that George has “stuck” Jill in “a terrible little efficiency,” with which Harris agrees. First, who says George is paying for it? Second, while the place admittedly has a small kitchenette it also sports a vestibule, a sizable living room, bedroom and bath and a glassed-off deck with a spectacular hillside view of L.A. Have Rich and Harris been well-paid for so long they’ve forgotten what an efficiency is? Did they ever know? I lived in one, for a bad year, at 20. It would have fit in Jill’s place at least twice with room left over for Rich and Harris to hold a colloquy on its merits.
#Shuck later said he never imagined Robert Altman would actually use the line. George Axelrod had filmed Roddy McDowall screaming, “Fuck you!” to his pursuers at the climax of Lord Love a Duck five years earlier, but coming as it did before the restructuring of the MPAA with its new letter-ratings, he was unable to get away with it then.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
Addendum: November 2022
Anent my citing of Lee Grant giving the finger to Jack Warden as possibly the first such American film occurrence since Speedy: I’ve just seen the movie of Catch-22, from 1970.
So few critics, so many poets 