Shampoo (1975)

          Here’s just one of the many fascinating details about Shampoo: Although it’s rightly considered a pinnacle achievement for the New Hollywood, the principal creative force behind the picture is very much a creature of Old Hollywood. Warren Beatty, the film’s leading man, producer, co-writer—and, according to gossip that’s surrounded the project for decades, uncredited co-director—was groomed for greatness by the studio system, even though his star didn’t truly rise until the counterculture era. And, just as Beatty is an inherently complicated Hollywood persona, the vision of late-1960s America he and his collaborators present in Shampoo resists simple classifications.
          On one level, the story of a lothario hairdresser who gets away with screwing his female clients because their husbands think he’s gay is a satire of social mores during a period of shifting sexual identities. On another level, Shampoo is a savvy political story examining various attitudes toward Richard Nixon at the time of his 1968 ascension to the White House. And yet on a third level, Shampoo is an ultra-hip study of Me Generation ennui, because nearly ever character in the film experiences some degree of existential crisis. Furthermore, the execution of the film is as classical as the content is brash—director Hal Ashby relies on elegant camerawork and meticulous pacing, rather than the flashy experimentation associated with many New Hollywood triumphs, even though the brilliant script by Beatty and Robert Towne breaks one taboo after another. (Let we forget, one of the film’s most memorable scenes involves costar Julie Christie drunkenly slurring, “I want to suck his . . .” Well, you get the picture.)

          Beatty, who often cleverly capitalized on his personal reputation as a Casanova, plays George Roundy, a Beverly Hills hairdresser beloved as much by female clients for his way with their bodies as for his way with their tresses. At the beginning of the story, he juggles relationships with his long-suffering girlfriend, Jill (Goldie Hawn), and with a rich housewife, Felicia (Lee Grant). Eager to open his own shop, George uses Felicia to get to her husband, Lester (Jack Warden), a wealthy businessman—who has a mistress of his own, Jackie (Christie). Smart and strong-willed, Jackie beguiles George, who somehow imagines he can have everything he wants—Felicia’s support, Jackie’s affection, Jill’s devotion, Lester’s patronage.
          Woven into all of this sexual farce is a bitter thread of class warfare, with Lester representing the arrogance of financial power and nearly every other character representing the desperation of financial need; Beatty and Towne draw provocative parallels between the cynicism of Nixon’s politics and the way various characters pursue skewed versions of the American Dream. The people in Shampoo are players and strivers, right down to Lester’s adolescent daughter, Lorna (Carrie Fisher), who has been taught by the unforgiving world to embrace her sexual power at a young age.

          Shampoo has moments that some find screamingly funny, such as the scene in which Christie makes the aforementioned startling declaration, but this is character-driven comedy of the most brittle sort, riding the fine line between humor and pathos. And that, among so many other things, is what makes Shampoo endlessly interesting—the film captures myriad facets of a confusing time. How appropriate, then, that the unobtrusive score is by pop star Paul Simon, one of the most important musical voices of the ’60s.

Shampoo: RIGHT ON

Don’t Look Now (1973)

          Adventurous director Nicolas Roeg’s breakthrough movie, the sexually charged psychological thriller Don’t Look Now, is one of those rare films that enjoys both cult-fave notoriety and deep critical respect. Yet try as I might, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the thing, despite having watched it at different times of life. The picture feels intelligent and provocative, so it’s possible I’m missing something, but Don’t Look Now’s opaque storyline and its perverse preoccupation with human suffering has always struck me as needlessly pretentious and grim. Therefore, I can’t find a whole lot to praise beyond certain aspects of acting and technical execution, but it’s clear many other viewers experience Don’t Look Now differently.

          Anyway, the quasi-Hitchockian storyline begins in England, where John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) live with their young daughter. During an eerie, fragmented opening scene, the daughter drowns on the Baxters’ estate. After the tragedy, John and Laura relocate to Venice, where John has work, as a means of escaping their traumatic past. However, Laura remains unsettled, especially when she meets a pair of strange older women, one of whom claims to be a psychic receiving messages from Laura’s dead child. Worse, John has a series of jarring experiences suggesting he’s doomed. Eventually, it all gets very weird, with freaky imagery ranging from cataract-clouded eyes to a homicidal dwarf. Throughout the picture, Roeg deliberately jostles the audience’s sense of time and place with brash editing, creating an effect that might favorably be called dreamlike. Less favorably, the effect might be called confusing or simply annoying.

          At the center of the picture, consuming much more screen time than seems necessary, is an intense sex scene between Christie and Sutherland that’s meant to represent their characters coming back to life after a period of grief. Whatever its story purpose, however, the scene has become infamous after decades of rumors that the actors actually had intercourse during filming. (The gossip has been corroborated and denied so many times that, at this point, it’s anybody’s guess what really happened.) Considering that the sex scene should only be one color in the larger painting—if anything, the picture’s gruesome ending is a more appropriate subject for analysis—the fact that Don’t Look Now is best known for a few moments of carnality says something about its diffuse nature.

          And to those who adore this picture, I can only say that I envy you the pleasure of seeing the great film I’ve never been able to find in the thickets of Roeg’s brash artistic posturing. While I can recognize the fierce commitment of the leading actors’ performances and I can tout the craftsmanship of the picture’s cinematography and editing, I just can’t swing with Roeg’s cinematic insouciance.

Don’t Look Now: FREAKY

Heaven Can Wait (1978)

          One of the most endearing love stories of the ’70s, Heaven Can Wait boasts an incredible amount of talent in front of and behind the camera. The flawless cast includes Warren Beatty, Dyan Cannon, Julie Christie, Vincent Gardenia, Charles Grodin, Buck Henry, James Mason, and Jack Warden; the script was written by Beatty, Henry, Elaine May, and Oscar-winner Robert Towne; and the picture was co-directed by Beatty and Henry. With notorious perfectionist Beatty orchestrating the contributions of these remarkable people, Heaven Can Wait unfolds seamlessly, mixing jokes and sentiment in an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser that’s executed so masterfully one can enjoy the film’s easy pleasures without feeling guilty afterward.

          Furthermore, the fact that the underlying material is recycled rather than original works in the picture’s favor—Beatty found a story that had already been proven in various different incarnations, cleverly modernized the narrative, and built on success. No wonder the film became a massive hit, landing at No. 5 on the list of the year’s top grossers at the U.S. box office and earning a slew of Oscar nominations.

          The story is fanciful in the extreme. After Joe Pendleton (Beatty), a second-string quarterback for the L.A. Rams, gets into a traffic accident, his soul is summoned to heaven by The Escort (Henry), an overeager guardian angel. Only it turns out Pendleton wasn’t fated to die in the accident, so in trying to save Pendleton pain, The Escort acted too hastily. Enter celestial middle manager Mr. Jordan (Mason), who offers to return Pendleton’s soul to earth. Little problem: His body has already been cremated. Pendleton adds another wrinkle by stating that he still intends to play in the upcoming Super Bowl. Eventually, Mr. Jordan finds a replacement body in the form of Leo Farnsworth, a ruthless, super-rich industrialist.

          Joe becomes Farnsworth—although we see Beatty, other characters see the industrialist—and Joe uses his new body’s resources to buy the Rams so he can play for the team. The delightful storyline also involves Joe’s beloved coach (Warden), Farnsworth’s conniving wife and assistant (Cannon and Grodin), and the beautiful activist (Christie) campaigning against Farnsworth’s ecologically damaging business practices.

          Heaven Can Wait is a soufflé in the mode of great ’30s screen comedy, featuring a procession of sly jokes, inspirational moments, and adroit musical punctuation. Every actor contributes something special—including Gardenia, who plays a detective investigating misdeeds on the Farnsworth estate—and the memorable moments are plentiful. Beatty’s legendary charm dominates, but in such a soft-spoken way that he never upstages his supporting players; Heaven Can Wait features some of the most finely realized ensemble acting in ’70s screen comedy. And, as with the previous screen version of this story—1941’s wonderful Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which was adapted, like the Beatty film, from Harry Seagall’s play Heaven Can Wait—the ending is unexpectedly moving. Whatever Heaven Can Wait lacks in substance, it makes up for in pure cotton-candy pleasure.

Heaven Can Wait: RIGHT ON

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

          Robert Altman’s bleak Western has an enviable reputation, but its stature stems as much from the movie’s novelty as from its content. Instead of the cowboy romanticism that pervaded other revisionist Westerns of the era, McCabe offers frontier nihilism, presenting a grim view of life in a tiny settlement on the verge of becoming a town. Warren Beatty stars as John McCabe, a slick but uneducated gambler who drifts into the settlement and quickly becomes its leading citizen by opening a grungy whorehouse. Julie Christie plays Constance Miller, a crass but savvy prostitute who persuades McCabe to offer his wares in a cleaner establishment with higher prices. McCabe’s success draws the attention of unscrupulous developers who try to buy out his interests, and his nervy refusal of their offer makes him a target for hired guns. The imaginative story, based on a novel by Edmund Naughton, gives Altman a framework for his singular style of creating dense atmosphere through lived-in locations, overlapping dialogue, and peculiar people.
          The principal outdoor set is amazing, creating the illusion of a hand-wrought town that emerged organically out of snowy terrain, and the photography by Vilmos Zsigmond is justifiably celebrated. Zsigmond lit the picture to simulate available illumination sources like moonlight and candles, then “flashed” the film by exposing it to light before processing in order to create a unique washed-out quality. Many of the usual suspects from Altman movies show up in the cast, with Rene Auberjonois, Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, and John Schuck adding their individualistic qualities of naïve pathos, so it’s easy to lose the soft-spoken leading performances in the colorful surroundings.
          Beatty gets points for downplaying his charm and handsomeness with a disagreeable temperament and a thick beard, though much of his performance his gimmicky, like the awkward soliloquies in which he articulates his motivations. Christie is equally bold playing an overbearing opium addict. However the quasi-romance between the two characters never really clicks, and the film is unnecessarily dreary, from the various pointless murders in the storyline to the Leonard Cohen dirges on the soundtrack. So while McCabe & Mrs. Miller is gorgeously wrought and virtually unlike any previous Western, its narrative intentions are opaque.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller: GROOVY

Demon Seed (1977)

Taking the crazed-computer menace of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in a depraved new direction, this strange thriller is based on a Dean Koontz novel, but bears the unmistakable signature of its director, Donald Cammell, notorious for co-directing the perverse cult classic Performance (1970). Even within the confines of a big-budget Hollywood movie, Cammell lets his freak flag fly throughout Demon Seed, which features an anguished Julie Christie as a woman who gets imprisoned, tortured, and impregnated (!) by a sentient computer. The source of her misery is her scientist husband (Fritz Weaver), who creates a supercomputer called Proteus IV; the computer’s desire for physical life prompts Christie’s artificial-intelligence insemination. Much of the movie comprises two-character scenes with Christie and Proteus, which mostly manifests as lava-lamp patterns on computer screens, so Christie’s main costar is unseen actor Robert Vaughn, who provides Proteus’ voice without much vigor. Adding a hallucinatory feel are long electronic-animation montages by Frank Mazzola, and Proteus’ eventual physical manifestation as a weird cube/diamond thing that extends long tendrils of geometric shapes. These trippy sequences are like Yes album covers come to life. However the movie suffers from idiotic plotting and long dull stretches, plus the miscasting of two behind-the-scenes players: Jaws cinematographer Bill Butler and frequent Peckinpah composer Jerry Fielding both contribute great work that belongs in a different, less bizarre movie. As for Christie, she flails through scenes that would be impossible for anyone to play, and seems embarrassed by her surroundings. So although Demon Seed is pretty damn weird, grounding elements like Butler’s crisp cinematography, Christie’s emphatically expressed anguish, and Vaughn’s overly explanatory voiceovers tether the movie to earth when it clearly wants to drift into even weirder territory.

Demon Seed: FREAKY

The Go-Between (1971)

The thorny tale of a collision between a romantic triangle and England’s merciless class system circa the year 1900, The Go-Between is defined by the contributions of Harold Pinter, who adapted the story from a novel by L.P. Hartley. The illustrious playwright known for cryptically menacing works like Betrayal, Pinter also boasts a celebrated screenwriting career mostly comprising gloomy adaptations, whether of his own work or esteemed books. The Go-Between was the third and final literary adaptation he made with posh filmmaker Joseph Losey, and like its predecessors the film is distinguished by deceptively polite dialogue, methodical storytelling, and painfully repressed emotion. The sum effect is not for all tastes (Pinter’s monastically restrained style generally tests my patience, and his work on this film is no exception), but there’s no denying that The Go-Between is a film of rare sophistication. The narrative concerns a working-class teen named Leo, who spends a summer at a lavish estate and becomes embroiled in adults’ romantic intrigue. Wealthy Marion (Julie Christie) is engaged to another member of the ruling class, but she lusts after a local farmer, Ted (Alan Bates). Marion charms Leo into carrying notes through which she and Ted arrange trysts, and the discovery of the illicit relationship damages everyone involved—including Leo, who is so anguished by his complicated feelings toward the beautiful Marion that he makes a bad situation much worse. The central narrative is powerful, but it’s surrounded, intentionally, with assorted emotional subplots that contribute to the film’s statement about the perniciousness of arbitrary divisions between people. As a result, the pacing seems glacial at times and the themes are excruciatingly subtle, even though key performances hit the right notes. Dominic Guard is passably petulant as young Leo, while Christie crisply personifies an insufferably self-indulgent brat, and Bates gives a muscular turn as a simple man doomed by unfortunate attraction. As aristocrats who watch the drama unfold, Edward Fox, Michael Gough, and Oscar nominee Margaret Leighton surround the leading players with chilly elegance masking vile snobbery. Amorous and vicious but still challengingly rarified, The Go-Between is a prime example of Christie’s icy allure.

The Go-Between: GROOVY