DEATH BECOMES HER 1992

In today's digitized, high-definition world—in which real-life, flesh and blood humans from the most mundane walks of life willingly subject themselves to near-medieval levels of torture in an effort to achieve the burnished, robo-mannequin sheen of Photoshopped magazine covers—I don't think it's possible to lampoon our culture's extreme youth-addiction and obsession with physical perfection. 

Happily, in1992 (ten years before Botox, and back when Cher and Michael Jackson were the reigning poster kids for plastic surgery excess), director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forest Gump) made this demented and dark comedy which broadly burlesques contemporary society's two most dominant religions: the worship of beauty and the fear of aging.

"Wrinkled, wrinkled little star...hope they never see the scars."
In the original screenplay, the line was "Wrinkle, wrinkle, go away, come again on Doris Day."
The exact words Elizabeth Taylor said to her reflection in The Mirror Crack'd (1980).

In this self-professed nod to Tales from the Crypt (the comic-book-based HBO anthology series for whom Zemeckis co-produced and occasionally directed), Death Becomes Her is a comedy-of-the-grotesque cartoon that posits the dream of eternal youth as an upscale zombie nightmare. Set in a baroque,  just-barely exaggerated vision of Beverly Hills where the thunderclaps and lightning flashes all hit their marks and know their cues, Death Becomes Her spans 51 years (1978 to 2029) in chronicling the ongoing competition between two college frenemies. A bitter rivalry every bit as combative and twice as deadly as Batman vs. Superman…only with better dialogue.

Meryl Streep as Madeline Ashton

Bruce Willis as Dr. Ernest Menville

Goldie Hawn as Helen Sharp

Isabella Rossellini as Lisle Von Rhuman

Former Radcliffe classmates Madeline Ashton (Mad for short) and Helen Sharp (Hel for keeps) are the kind of friends that only a shared alma mater could produce. Though we ultimately come to learn that they are but two antagonistic sides of the same counterfeit coin, when first glimpsed, the artificial Madeline and the apprehensive Helen couldn't be more dissimilar, appearing to be friends in name only. 

Plain-Jane Helen, an aspiring author of diffident, soft-spoken character, unconcerned with appearance, has a history of having her boyfriends stolen by the ostentatiously glamorous Madeline. Madeline, an obscenely shallow, superhumanly self-enchanted actress of questionable talent, is all surface charm and charisma, but otherwise appears totally devoid of a single redeeming character trait. She concerns herself with looks and appearances to the exclusion of all else. 

"Tell me, doctor...do you think I'm starting to NEED you?"

The women's heated rivalry temporarily assumes the guise of a romantic triangle when beginning-to-show-her-age Madeline sets her sights upon (and effortlessly steals) Helen's fiancé, the bland-but-gifted Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Ernest Menville. Of course, there's no romance to this romantic triangle at all, what with Madeline's interest in the colorless dolt being solely of the self-serving variety (she gets to assert her desirability superiority over Helen while simultaneously securing a lifetime of free nip/tuck services); but this last-straw betrayal by both fiancé and friend proves enough to send poor milquetoast Helen right over the edge. 

What's The Matter With Helen?

Cue the passage of fourteen years. Everybody is miserable, and nobody winds up with what they thought they wanted. Madeline, career and looks in decline, is blatantly unfaithful to husband Ernest, and goes to Norma Desmond extremes to stay young. Meanwhile, emasculated Ernest has succumbed to alcoholism and is reduced to plying his surgical skills on corpses. 

But it's Helen who rises like an Avenging Angel from the doughnut-crumbed, canned-frosting ruins of her nervous breakdown. Magnificently svelte, newly glamorized, channeling her inner Madeline, and, after several years of therapy, imbued with a Dolly Levi-esque sense of purpose ("For I've got a goal again! I've got a drive again! I'm gonna feel my heart coming alive again!"). Naturally, Helen's goals aren't near as lofty or honorable as those of that musical matchmaker: Helen's newfound purpose is to reclaim her life by eradicating Madeline's.

Hel Goes Mad and Dedicates Her Life To Making Mad's Life Hell

Alas, Helen's strength of resolve is all well and good, but homicidally speaking, the best-laid plans of mice and men are doomed to failure when the man in question (Ernest) is an indisputable mouse. By the same token, it's not the best idea to wage a to-the-death battle when both combatants, thanks to the supernatural intervention of a raven-haired sorceress and her immortality potion, can't really die.

I saw Death Becomes Her for the first time on cable TV in the mid-'90s, and I immediately regretted never having seen it in a theater. I thought it was outrageously funny, and I imagined seeing it with an audience would have been an experience similar to my first time seeing What's Up, Doc?: the laughter being so loud and continuous, you have to see the film twice to pick up all the lost dialogue. I've no idea if public response to Death Becomes Her was anywhere near as vociferous (it's a weird little film), but I found it to be one of the most consistently funny comedies I'd seen since the '70s heyday of Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, & Madeline Kahn.

Incorporating comic book sensibilities and B-horror movie tropes into a dark satire of those frozen-in-time animatronic waxworks endemic to the environs of Beverly Hills, Death Becomes Her provides director Robert Zemeckis an ideal vehicle to indulge his fondness for absurdist special effects. The screenplay, a best-of-both-worlds/Frankenstein collaboration between TV sitcom writer Martin Donovan (That Girl, The MTM Show) and action/adventure writer Martin Koepp- (Jurassic Park, Mission impossible), deftly maintains a balance of broad action (think Tex Avery cartoons or Bugs vs. Daffy Looney Tunes) and oversized characterizations.  

Late-director Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?)
contributes a hilarious unbilled cameo 

Which brings me to Death Becomes Her's most vital attribute: its cast. Streep, Hawn, and Willis—talented professionals all—had, at this stage in their careers, fallen into that movie star rut of delivering precisely what was expected of them, nothing more. A look back at their film output during this time reveals each actor contributing reliable-but-unexceptional performances in so-so films. Professional, journeyman-like performances devoid of either spark or surprise.

But Death Becomes Her—in casting against type—taps into something fresh in each of them. With abandon, they lose themselves in the outlandish, outsized characters they're called on to play, blowing away the cobwebs of predictability from their individual screen personas. Together they form an unholy trinity of bad behavior while treating us to the liveliest, most unexpected, enjoyably over-the-top emoting of their careers.

Madder' n Hell
(Mad, Ern, & Hel)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When television broadcasts changed from analog to digital, and I purchased my first HDTV, one of my strongest recollections is of how dazzlingly crisp and clear it the images were. Simultaneously, how clinically unforgiving it was to human beings.

Television programs I had grown used to watching in their natural, fuzzy state were suddenly all so clear! The images so sharp I could make out the weave knit twill fibers in Fred Mertz's jacket.

But my lord, the havoc it played with people's faces. It was like you were looking at everyone through a dermatologist's magnifying glass—bringing to mind that line from Cukor's The Women "Good grief! I hate to tell you, dear, but your skin makes the Rocky Mountains look like chiffon velvet!" 

Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep- two longtime favorites of mine,
really come alive as zombies

I don't know what it was like elsewhere, but the cumulative effect HDTV had on local Los Angeles newscasters and even minor TV personalities was to have men and women scrambling to the plastic surgeons in a mad rush reminiscent of the final reel to The Day of the Locust. 

Over the last decade or so, the already youth and looks-obsessed entertainment industry has seen a normalization of the kind of rampant surgical restructuring that once caused Mickey Rourke and Cher so much tabloid grief. The artificially enhanced appearance has now grown so common, it has become its own aesthetic.

What Price Beauty?

And while everybody seems fine with health-related elective surgeries like dental and Lasik, people still harbor strong opposing opinions about those who turn to medical science in order to turn back the clock, retard the aging process, or sculpt and reconfigure themselves to fit a particular beauty standard.

Death Becomes Her is no serious treatise on our culture's preoccupation with youth and slavish devotion to beauty, but by addressing these hot-button issues in a comical, larger-than-life framework—it manages to be one of the sharpest and to-the-point commentaries committed to film.

PERFORMANCES

Broad, farcical comedy of the sort employed in Death Becomes Her is awfully hard to pull off (1991's Soapdish comes to mind…unfavorably). In fact, the main reason I didn't see Death Becomes Her when it was released was because the trailer so turned me off. Not only did it look far too exaggerated and silly (it recalled Streep's She-Devil, a film I absolutely hated), but in addition: I never much cared for Bruce Willis; Goldie Hawn's post-Private Benjamin output had grown increasingly derivative, and the continued forays into comedy by Streep-the-Serious (Postcards from the Edge, Defending Your Life) had the effect of subduing her talent, not showcasing it. 

It surprises me a bit to glance over Bruce Willis' long list of credits on IMDB and come to the conclusion that Mortal Thoughts (1991) and Death Becomes Her are the only films of his I like. He's so good here. Funny and touching, he provides a grounded emotional contrast to his co-stars' magnificent maliciousness

But what always brings me back to rewatching Death Becomes Her is how all the elements gel so smoothly. Everyone from composer Alan Silvestri to the film's vast army of FX wizards are all on the same darkly comic book page. Best of all, the actors and their pitch-perfect performances are never dwarfed by the dated but still-impressive special effects.

The comedy is perhaps too dark to be to everyone's taste, likewise the tone of exaggerated non-reality. But for me, all these disparate elements coalesce to create a howlingly funny film that feels like a major studio version of those reveling-in-bad-taste underground/counterculture comedies like Andy Warhol's BAD or John Waters' Female Trouble (which could serve as Death Becomes Her's subtitle).

The arresting Isabella Rossellini is a special effect all unto herself.
Alluring and dangerous, she is a dynamic, indelible force in her brief scenes.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A major highlight of Death Becomes Her is getting to see the great Madeline Ashton in full diva-fabulous mode appearing onstage in a misguided musical version of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. A play, appropriately enough, about an aging star making a comeback. The time is 1978, and, as described in the screenplay, our first glimpse of 40-ish Madeline is of her "Singin' and dancin' up a storm seemingly without benefit of training in singin' or dancin'."

The song she's singing is a riotously vainglorious paean to self, titled "Me," and the accompanying dance production number is a garish compendium of every star-gets-hoisted-about-by-chorus-boys Broadway musical cliché in the book. The number is terrible—from the song itself to the costuming, choreography (they break into "The Hustle" at one uproarious point), and the over-emphasized "stereotypically gay" voices of the chorus boys—and therefore, it's also absolutely brilliant.

What's great about the number is that without benefit of inserting any intentionally comedic elements (save for a ceaselessly shedding feather boa), it manages to be side-splittingly funny and cheesy as all get-out merely by channeling any number of '70s variety shows. As a quick glance at YouTube will attest, this isn't a spoof or parody at all. Nothing about Madeline's dance routine would be out of place on an episode of The Hollywood Palace, The Ed Sullivan Show, or take-your-pick Mitzi Gaynor TV special.

Although Madeline is supposed to be awful, Streep is actually quite marvelous. Her musicality and phrasing are spot on. Her movements are sharp, she never misses a beat with any of her gestures, and there's an effortlessness to the number of small bits of comic business she's able to insert into the performance without ever losing her stride. What really makes the number so hysterically funny is the level of Las Vegas showroom self-satisfaction Madeline radiates throughout. In her mind, she is clearly laying them in the aisles. The joy she takes in her own wonderfulness and sincere obliviousness to just how ridiculous the number is makes for a priceless moment in wince-inducing musical cinema.

The first time I saw Streep perform "Me," what immediately popped into mind was the 1986 Academy Awards telecast. That was the year Teri Garr opened the show with a truly cringe-worthy production number around the song Flying Down To Rio that was every bit as atrocious as Madeline's First Act closer (even down to the same tearaway skirt and hyperactive chorus boys). Further cementing the recollection: Meryl Streep, who was nominated that year for Out of Africa, when interviewed about the show afterward, expressed her enjoyment of Garr's performance and her wish to someday be invited to sing and dance in a production number like it. She got her wish.

Late actress Alaina Reed (Sesame Street, 227) as the psychologist
who inadvertently sets Helen on her murderous course 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Like Sweet Charity, Fatal Attraction, and the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors, Death Becomes Her is a film whose original ending was jettisoned due to unfavorable preview response.

Grotesquely disfigured and unable to maintain themselves with any level of precision,
Madeline & Helen attend Ernest's funeral in the year 2029

In the original version, after escaping from Lisle's, Ernest fakes his death. He runs off with Toni (Tracey Ullman, the entirety of whose footage ended up on the cutting room floor), a sympathetic owner of a local bar he frequented. Jump ahead 27 years, Madeline and Helen, still beautiful and perfect, are in the Swiss Alps, bored with life and each other's company. In the distance, they glimpse an old, hunched-over, toddling married couple. Madeline comments on how pathetic they are; Helen, as she watches them walk away, hand in liver-spotted hand, is not so sure. We learn that the couple is Ernest and Toni, now very old, but very much in love. Fade Out.

I absolutely adore that ending! Test audiences claimed the more poignant conclusion didn't fit the more cartoonish flavor of the rest of the film, so rewrites and reshoots resulted in the very good, very funny ending currently in place. It's not a bad ending at all, and based on the success of the film, it is perhaps more in keeping with the tone established at the start; but honestly, I just love the idea of the jettisoned ending. I think it would have provided the perfect coda for a wonderful film.

Helen and Madeline, talons sharpened, have become living gargoyles

BONUS MATERIAL
Goldie Hawn discusses her preference for the film's original ending HERE

The original theatrical trailer features many scenes that never made it into the final film. HERE

 

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2016

EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU 1996

This essay is part of The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by The Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. 

This post is dedicated to Drew, but for more Barrymore, visit the site!

At one time or another, everyone has had the experience of feeling as though some real-life event or activity were taking place in a movie. For example (and speaking from embarrassingly personal experience): owning a convertible in Los Angeles in the early 80s made it a certainty that when Blondie’s Call Me played on the car radio, that infectiously percussive, synth-pop ditty instantly became my background music. Even a routine Slurpee run to the nearby 7-Eleven was transformed into the slick opening credits sequence of my very own 80s erotic thriller.

The desire for reality to more resemble the idealized fantasy world of the movies is, perhaps, a film fan's wish as old as cinema itself. And while there's no telling the countless headaches, heartaches, and dashed illusions to be spared were one were outfitted with some kind of built-in immunity to the seductive sway of Hollywood's Technicolor fairy tales; were such a thing even possible, I'm more than certain that a reality stripped of the belief in the possibility of the impossible would hardly qualify as anybody's idea of living, anyway.

The eternal paradox of movies has always been its ability to render the real as slightly dreamlike, while capturing the essence of the ethereal with canny verisimilitude. No other sphere of emotion seems to inspire this quality in movies as evocatively as the contemporary notion of romantic love. Especially love of the transcendent, dizzying, sweep-one-off-one's-feet variety favored by musicals. And when it comes to romance and the eloquent expression of love, can any movie genre compare with the Hollywood musical?

Woody Allen as Joe Berlin

Goldie Hawn as Steffi Dandridge

Alan Alda as Bob Dandridge

Drew Barrymore as Skylar Dandridge

Edward Norton as Holden Spence

Julia Roberts as Von Siddell

Everyone Says I Love You is Woody Allen’s first - and to date, only - musical. Chronicling a year in the life of an affluent (what else?) extended family residing in New York’s Upper East Side, Allen uses the changing seasons to metaphorically underscore this nervous musical comedy about the variable nature of romance. As characters with I-wish-I-could-believe-he’s-being-satirical names like Skylar, Djuna, and Holden navigate the choppy waters of love in picturesque Venice and Paris; Woody Allen’s familiar universe (where every city looks and feels exactly like New York) reveals itself to be a wonderland of  magic realism.  

The fantastic has always figured in Woody Allen’s particular take on reality: Humphrey Bogart was his life coach in Play it Again Sam, Marshall McLuhan materialized from behind a movie poster to silence an intellectual boor in Annie Hall, etc. But the world depicted in Everyone Says I Love You is a world swept up and in concert with the giddy elation of love and spring fever. Ordinary folk break into spontaneous song and dance; store mannequins come to life; the injured and infirm leap and turn cartwheels in a hospital; the dead cavort amongst the living; and, in my absolute favorite Woody Allen moment of all time, romance grants lovers the ability to defy the laws of gravity.

Just You, Just Me
Store mannequins put on a show for engaged couple, Holden (Norton) and Skylar (Barrymore)  

But don’t be fooled; for all its song, dance, humor, appealing performances, beautiful locations, game cast, and moments of genuine charm; Everyone Says I Love You is still, never, ever anything more than your typical Woody Allen film. Which is both its boon (I like that Allen doesn’t bend his style to fit the conventions of the genre, he literally makes them dance to his tune), and its bane (if you already don’t like Woody Allen, this film isn’t likely to turn you into a convert).   

Perhaps due to the challenge presented by shooting a full-scale musical on location with a score of some 16-plus classic songs -lushly arranged, at least four choreographed production numbers, and a cast of largely non-singers who (according to production notes) only discovered they’d signed on for a musical after having already committed to the project; Allen gave himself more latitude than usual in recycling so many of his familiar tropes:

The eccentric, broadly-drawn extended family - Radio Days, Hanna & Her Sisters

The refined character attracted to a coarser individual - Love & Death, Interiors, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Hannah & Her Sisters

The heart wants what it wants - Manhattan, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

Two women attracted to the same man- September, Hanna & Her Sisters

Spying on an individual’s therapy session - Another Woman
Allen’s old coot/young woman fetish - Manhattan,  Husbands & Wives

Allen’s bougie lifestyle fetish - Too many films to list

Cuddle up A Little Closer 
Playing the daughter of Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn, actress Natasha Lyonne is Djuna, the film's narrator and central romantic flibbertigibbet. Here she's serenaded by love-at-first-sight beau, Ken (Billy Crudup) who's joined in song by cabbie Robert Khakh, who sings the 1908 ditty in Hindi

When you add to the mix the fact that Allen also indulges his other catalog of obsessions: The Marx Brothers, jazz, pseudo-intellectual pretensions, and people who actually consider "poet" to be a career path; Everyone Says I Love You winds up representing a kind of  Woody Allen "best of" collection set to music. Happily for me, it manages to be the best of his lighter, funnier films.

Looking at You
Happily married couple Steffi (Hawn) and Bob (Alda) head a household overrun with five children, a grandfather, a tyrannical maid, and Steffi's romantically luckless ex-husband, Joe (Allen)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Woody Allen, a man who strikes me in interviews as someone incapable of understanding even the most elemental aspects of human behavior, does seem to understand movie musicals. Indeed, a great deal more than many directors like Rob Marshall (Nine) or Susan Stroman (The Producers), who have their roots in musical theater.

There’s something intriguingly off about the idea of a Woody Allen musical. At first glance, it seems as if the director’s trademark neurotic, over-cerebral style is an ill fit for a genre characterized by breezy lightheartedness and fantasy. But upon reflection, one realizes that Allen’s films have long taken place within a fantasy bubble. What is his hermetically sealed vision of Manhattan, populated with characters bearing little to no resemblance to actual human beings, but an update of those impossibly rich penthouse dwellers who spent all their time in tuxedos and evening gowns in those Warner Bros. musicals from the 30s?

The already built-in artificiality of Woody Allen’s world, one he’s cultivated in film after film, is a Cinderella-shoe fit for a musical, simply because one of the chief hurdles of contemporary musicals has been the increasing audience resistance to the conceit of average people spontaneously bursting into song in natural surroundings.
Woody Allen's version of Manhattan has always been a New York of his own state of mind, so there's no authentic "reality" to be shattered. With Everyone Says I Love You, Woody's artificial New York feels tailor-made for the genre-mandated artifice of the movie musical!

My Baby Just Cares for Me
 A trip to Harry Winston for an engagement ring erupts into an amusing production number

By the 1990s, the movie musical had almost become extinct due to director's inability to make the genre work. Modern audiences (who had no problem with animated characters) just found real people singing onscreen to be either comical or corny.The genius of Everyone Says I Love You is that Allen, rather than trying to ignore that fact, distract audiences from it, or try to think of clever ways to sidestep that particular hurdle; structures the entire film around exploiting it. He embraces the corniness, shares in the camps, and by doing so, celebrates the naivete of old musicals.

Jumping in with both feet, Allen instantly addresses the issue of audience discomfort by having the very first words of the film sung by a character. He even plays with the genre by citing the characters' self-awareness ("We're not the typical kind of family you'd find in a musical comedy") and consciousness of their vocalizing ("What are you singing about? You're not in love with Holden!")

But best of all, Woody finds a way to keep his fantasy on human scale. Ordinary people DO break into spontaneous song, but only in appropriately ordinary voices. Choreographed production numbers erupt around them, but the characters fail to be instantly imbued with terpsichorean gifts. Instead, they move with the ungainly grace of those overcome by emotion.

And therein lies the source of Everyone Says I Love You’s ultimate triumph of charm over Allen’s sometimes problematic world view: all the singing is just an extension of the character's emotions.

If I Had You
Skylar finds herself falling for the ill-bred charms of ex-convict Charles Ferry (Tim Roth) 

I loved musicals long before I became a dancer, but I think movie musicals dug their own grave by their over-reliance on cold spectacle and technical polish. I much prefer the wavering, unsure voices in Everyone Says I Love You, to the kind of rigid vocal perfection of a Marnie Nixon (West Side Story My Fair Lady). Likewise, the dancing here is sometimes a little ragged, but it touches my heart more than any of the impenetrably cold, gut-busting numbers in Hello, Dolly!. When it comes to musicals, I still prefer being made to feel something about the characters than merely being asked to ooh and aah over empty spectacle and technical polish.

Makin' Whoopee
Patients, orderlies, and doctors alike weigh in on the consequences of marriage

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

When it comes to the creative expression of emotion, I’ve always felt there to be a kind of unofficial hierarchy of intensity. If it can be verbalized, you say it; if it’s a feeling difficult to put into words, write it. Feelings too strong for the spoken and written word cry out to be sung, and that which transcends verbalization, can only be danced.

That’s why musicals are the ideal genre for depicting love and romance. It’s a natural thing for people to want to express happiness. When you’re a kid, you skip, maybe as an adult you’ll whistle or hum…but for the adult, the sex act is the only outlet we’ve afforded ourselves for unrestrained expression of amorous joy. An act so personal and subjective that the more literal its depiction, the less joyous any of it seems. 

More than any other genre, musicals are able to externally depict the internal sensations of love. 

In Everyone Says I Love You, Woody Allen takes the usual hyper emotionalism of his stock characters to the next logical step. They sing of their joy, their longing, and their anxiety. True to the Woody Allen universe, the film’s main musical theme is the 1931 pop standard, I’m Thru With Love; not a song about the rhapsodic elation of love found, but of the wistful resolve of love lost and never to be.

I'm Thru With Love
The elegant pas de deux Goldie Hawn & Woody Allen perform along the Left Bank of the Seine is beyond sublime  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I enjoy Everyone Says I Love You a great deal, some parts I even love (the Halloween sequence is delightful, and Drew Barrymore and Edward Norton make an adorable couple). But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bit of a chore slogging through yet another one of Allen’s peculiar takes on morality and ethics. (Everyone Says I Love You was released some four years after this messy breakup with Mia Farrow, but just one month before the publication of Farrows tell-all memoir, What Falls Away.)

One of the things I’ve always hated about those sex comedies of the 60s was the degree to which lying and deception was depicted as a cute, harmless path to love. In this film, the heinously invasive subterfuge Allen’s character engages in to snag Julia Roberts (a stomach-churning pairing suggesting necrophilia more than a May/December romance) feels downright sociopathic.

However, the overall appeal of the cast, and the goodwill extended by the film’s sprightly tone and lovely score of old standards, goes a long way toward mitigating my general impatience with Allen’s self-serving moral code.

Hooray For Captain Spaulding
A Marx Brothers-themed Christmas Eve costume ball

Everyone Says I Love You was released at a time when it was widely believed only animated films could succeed as musicals. Allen's film, a more traditional musical, was released in December 1996, the same month as Alan Parker's Evita - a musical that seemed to go out of its way to try to make audiences forget it was a musical.

Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)
Recent guests at a NY funeral home refuse to let death spoil their fun

PERFORMANCES
Since a tribute to the illustrious Barrymore family occasioned this particular post, I'll reserve the focus of this section exclusively to then 20-year-old Drew Barrymore (granddaughter of John) as Skylar Dandridge. Unique in this instance not only for being the sole member of the cast to be dubbed (crippled by fear, she claimed her voice was too abysmal even for a film populated with untrained singers), but having the distinction of later conquering her fear and singing in her own voice in two (!) later films: Music & Lyrics and Lucky You, both released in 2007.

A star at the age of six with her appearance in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Drew survived a Lindsay Lohan-ish adolescent to become a popular star, director, and producer. While a likeable and winning personality on talk shows, I confess I've always credited (blamed?)  Barrymore (along with Sarah Jessica Parker, Catherine Heigl, and Matthew McConaughey) for killing the romantic comedy.

Barrymore is well within her rom-com comfort zone in Everyone Says I Love You, but in small doses her familiar giggle and demur routine comes off rather well. Her close association with Adam Sandler has made her strictly persona non grata with me, but her performance here and in the exceptional Grey Gardens (2009) reminds me that she is indeed a very talented actress. Albeit one to whom the lyric from the song, My Baby Just Cares For Me applies: "There's sometimes a doubt about her choices!" 


BONUS MATERIAL
The "Everyone Says I Love You" number from the Marx Brothers film, Horse Feathers (1932) 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

SHAMPOO 1975

Watch. Rinse. Repeat.

I don’t know of any other film in my collection of heavy-rotation favorites that has undergone as many transformations of perception for me as Shampoo. It seems as though every time I see it, I’m at a different stage in my life; each new set of life circumstances yielding an entirely different way of looking at this marvelously smart comedy.

Shampoo has been described as everything from a socio-political sex farce to a satirical indictment of American moral decay as embodied by the disaffected Beautiful People of Los Angeles, circa 1968. Taking place over the course of 24 hectic hours in the life of a womanizing Beverly Hills hairdresser (Terrence McNally’s The Ritz mined laughs from the improbability of a gay garbage man; Towne & Beatty do the same with its not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is heterosexual hairdresser running gag), Shampoo chronicles the petty crises, joyless bed-hopping, and self-centered betrayals amongst a particularly shallow sampling of the denizens of The City of Angels—assuming, of course, betrayal is something possible between individuals incapable of committing to anyone or anything.

Nixon's the One
Four people, each with their own agenda. Five if you count the smiling portrait in the background

The film takes place in and around Election Day 1968, and, fueled by our foreknowledge of what Nixon’s Presidency portended for America with its attendant undermining of the nation’s moral fiber and erosion of political faith; Shampoo attempts—not always persuasively—to draw parallels. The film reflects on the political optimism of the '60s and contrasts it with the narcissistic aimlessness of a small group of characters. Characters who can’t stop looking into mirrors or get their collective heads out of their asses long enough to take notice of anything around them which doesn't impact their lives personally. No one in the film even votes!

Warren Beatty as George Roundy

Julie Christie as Jackie Shawn

Goldie Hawn as Jill Haynes

Lee Grant as Felicia Karpf

Jack Warden as Lester Karpf

George (Beatty), an aging lothario and preternatural adolescent, may be the most popular hairdresser at the Beverly Hills salon where he plies his trade, but sensing time passing, feels the pang of wishing he had done more with his life. George’s ambition is to open a place of his own, but the not-very-bright beautician routinely undermines his long-term goals by allowing himself to become distracted by the short-term gratification offered by all the grasping women and easy sex that got him into the hairdressing business in the first place. Juggling a girlfriend (Hawn), a former girlfriend (Christie), a client (Grant), that client’s teenage daughter (Carrie Fisher, making her film debut), all while trying to negotiate financing for the salon from said client’s cuckolded husband (Jack Warden); George finds himself in way over his pouffy, Jim Morrison-tressed head. 

Directed by Hal Ashby (Harold & Maude), Shampoo is really the brainchild and creative collaboration of two of Hollywood’s most legendary tinkerers: Warren Beatty and screenwriter Robert Towne. Some sources site Shampoo's genesis as having originated with discarded ideas for 1965's What's New, Pussycat? (a film initially to have starred Beatty), while a Julie Christie biography credits her with having brought the 1675 restoration comedy The Country Wife to Beatty's attention, and it serving as the real source material for Shampoo.

Legend also has it that Shampoo—which underwent nearly 8-years of rewrites and countless hours of on-set nitpicking—was inspired as much by Beatty's own exploits as Hollywood’s leading man-slut, as that of the life of late hairdresser-to-the-stars, Jay Sebring (a victim of the Manson family that fateful night in 1969. Beatty was Sebring’s client for a time). Also thrown into the mix: celebrity hairstylist Gene Shacove (who is given a technical consultant credit for Shampoo, but whom I mainly know as a litigant in a 1956 lawsuit filed by TV personally/cult figure, Vampira, claiming he burned her hair off with one of his dryers). Even hairdresser-to-producer Jon Peters (Eyes of Laura Mars) weighed in, claiming the film was inspired by his life.

Blow Job

That so many men actually clamored to be credited with being the inspiration for a character depicted in the film as a selfish, shallow, narcissistic, slow-witted, self-disgusted loser, is perhaps the aptest, ironic commentary on the absolutely stupefying superficiality of the Hollywood/Beverly Hills set. 

I saw Shampoo nearly a year after its release (I fell in love with the movie poster and bought it long before I even saw the film), but remember distinctly what a huge, huge hit it was during its initial release. I mean, lines around the block, rave reviews, lots of word of mouth, and endless articles hailing/criticizing it for its frank language and (by '70s standards) outrageous humor. Its popularity spawned many satires (The Carol Burnett Show featured a character named Warren Pretty), porn rip-offs (the subject is a natural), and even spawned an exploitation film titled Black Shampoo, which I've yet to see, but I hear features a chainsaw showdown with the mob(!) Anyhow, Shampoo is a marvelous film, to be sure, but in hindsight, I think a sizable amount of the hoopla surrounding it can be attributed to two things:

1) The "The Sandpiper" Factor.  In 1965 audiences made a hit out of that sub-par Taylor/Burton vehicle chiefly because it offered the voyeuristic thrill of seeing the world’s most famous illicit lovers playing illicit lovers. The same held true for Shampoo. In 1975, audiences were willing to pay money to speculate about the similarities between Shampoo’s skirt-chasing antihero and Warren Beatty’s reputation as Hollywood's leading ladies’ man. That the film featured on-and-off girlfriend Julie Christie; former affair, Goldie Hawn (so alleges ex-husband, Bill Hudson); and future girlfriend, Michelle Phillips, only further helped to fuel gossip and sell tickets. 

2) Pre-Bicentennial jitters. Shampoo was released at the beginning of 1975. Three years after the Watergate Scandal broke, one year after Nixon’s impeachment, and just three months before the official end of the Vietnam War. As the flood of “Crisis of Confidence in America” movies of 1976 proved (Nashville, Taxi Driver, Network, All the President’s Men, etc.) movie audiences were more than primed for anything reaffirming their suspicion that America’s values were in serious need of reexamination. 

Carrie Fisher (making her film debut)as Lorna Karpf
In 1975 this line got a HUGE laugh. Her other famous line got a HUGE gasp

I found Shampoo to be a funny, well-written and superbly-acted look at the spiritual cost of the "free love" movement of the '60s. It is a witty, intelligent, and keenly observed comedy of manners. What it never was to me was a particularly profound political satire. The election night stuff, the TVs and radios blaring ignored campaign speeches and election returns...none of it gelled for me as an ironic statement. Certainly nothing deeper than the observation that America's complacency is what helped a man like Nixon get into office. I'm not saying that others haven't found the subtext to be appropriately weighty, I just find it significant that over the years I've encountered many people who love Shampoo, but only dimly recall any of the political references (or even the poignant and pointed Vietnam-related death of an unseen character).

In Shampoo's most talked-about scene, Rosemary's Baby producer William Castle chats up Julie Christie, while to Beatty's left sits character actress, Rose Michtom. Fans of Get Smart will recognize Rose from her 44 appearances on that TV show (one of the executive producers was her nephew). A curious tidbit: she's the daughter of the inventor of the Teddy Bear(!), and even has a website devoted to her Get Smart appearances.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Movies about unsympathetic people are not always my thing, but I do admit to being a sucker for films that address a subtle human truth I've encountered many times in my interactions with people: my dislike of a distasteful person often pales in comparison to the depth of their own self-loathing. There's often a great deal of pain and self-recrimination behind the "have it all" facades of people society has convinced us live "the good life." In sending up the lives of Hollywood's tony set, Shampoo does a great job of making us laugh at the sad fact that there's often not a lot of "there" there.

Shampoo is that it is one of those rare films which showcases the lives of the rich and privileged, yet at the same time is able to convey a sense of hollowness and self-disappointment at the core of each of its characters. And in a comedy yet! It’s a subtle, extremely difficult thing to do (talk to Martin Scorsese about The Wolf of Wall Street), but it gives characters you might otherwise loathe, a sense of humanity. They become individuals whom I can both identify with and understand…if not necessarily like. I think the award-winning screenplay by Towne/Beatty is absolutely brilliant. An early draft of which I read, even more so, as it fleshed out the friendship between Jackie and Jill even more.

Producer/director Tony Bill  plays TV commercial director, Johnny Pope

PERFORMANCES

OK, I’ll get this out of the way from the top: Julie Christie is absolutely amazing in this movie (surprise!).  Not only does she look positively stunning throughout (even with that odd hairdo Beatty gives her, which I've never been quite sure was supposed to be funny or not) but she brings a sad, resigned pragmatism to her rather hard character. A character not unlike Darling’s selfish Diana Scott.  Whatever one thinks about her performance, I think everyone can agree that stupendous face of hers is near-impossible not to get lost in.

You Had One Eye in the Mirror as You Watched Yourself Gavotte
One of my favorite things in Shampoo is the way the characters are perpetually captured checking themselves out in mirrors, even in the middle of serious discussions or arguments. 

Lee Grant's voracious-out-of-boredom Beverly Hills housewife won Shampoo's only acting Oscar, and nominated Jack Warden really deserved to win (his is perhaps the film's strongest performance), but I think Goldie Hawn is especially good. Comedic Hawn is great, but serious Hawn has always been my favorite. The scenes of her character's dawning awareness of what kind of man she's allowed herself to fall in love with are genuinely touching, and among the best work she's ever done. Not to overuse a word bandied about in Shampoo with vacant casualness, but Hawn is great.

As Shampoo's most sympathetic character, from her early scenes as a ditsy blond to the latter ones revealing a clear-eyed, defiant strength, Hawn shows considerable range.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Shampoo is peppered with celebrity cameos and walk-ons. All adding to the feeling that this isn't a period film taking place in 1968 (in many ways the period detail in Shampoo leaves a lot to be desired) so much as a 1975 tabloid-inspired Warren Beatty roman à clef.

Michelle Phillips

Susan Blakely

Andrew Stevens

Howard Hesseman

Jaye P. Morgan

Joan Marshall, aka Jean Arless from William Castle's Homicidal, aka Mrs. Hal Ashby

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As films go, Shampoo is all about rinse and repeat. It's a new film each time I revisit it.

1975- First time I was a sex-obsessed teenager (and virgin). Beatty seemed old to me at the time, so I didn’t fully understand how a fully-grown man could allow his life to unravel around him due to an inability to keep it in his pants. What did I know?

1983- OK, let’s put it this way; at this stage of my life I “got” the whole sex thing in Shampoo. Also, I was living in Los Angeles by this point, so not only had the film’s satirical jibes at Los Angeles “culture” grown funnier, they became perceptive.

1990- Throughout the '80s and '90s, I worked as a dancer, an aerobics instructor, and a personal trainer in Los Angeles. If you have even a tangential familiarity with any of these professions, you’ll understand why, at this stage, Shampoo started to take on the look of a documentary for me. In fact, I came to know several George Roundys over the years. Straight men drawn to these largely female-centric professions, amiable, screw-happy, and more than willing to reap the benefits of working all day around women, and being in the sexual-orientation minority where males were concerned. All of them exhibited behavior so identical to that attributed to the George character in Shampoo, I gained a renewed respect for the accuracy of Towne and Beatty’s screenplay.

Today- I’m happily in my late 50s (I'm happy about it, not ecstatic); nearly 20 years into a committed; loving relationship; thankful and gratified by the journey of growth my life has been and continues to be. When I look at Shampoo now, I watch it with empathy toward its characters I don’t believe I had when I was younger. Who knew then that so much in the film referenced merely growing up? (Jill's exasperated harangue at George, Jackie being surprised that an old hippie friend is still throwing the same kind of parties).

I think what I now know that I couldn’t have known in my 20s or 30s, is the profound emptiness of these people’s lives. Never having been in love before, I didn’t know what I was missing. Now I understand how wonderful a thing it is to be that close to someone—to trust someone that much—to be able to share a life; and how terrifying and disappointing life can feel without it.

Especially when one faces the realization—at middle age, yet—that the very life choices one made so casually in one’s youth (the lack of introspection, the inattention to character, kindness, or concern for others) have consequences that can render one incapable of ever attaining these things.

It's too late...
Jackie checks to makes sure her future is still secure with Lester as George confesses his vulnerability

Shampoo is still amusing to me, but its comedy has more of a wistful quality about it these days. A wistfulness born of the characters' regret over time wasted, and the bitterness that comes of reaping the rotted fruit of (as Socrates wrote) "the unexamined life." Shampoo to me is a film that mourns the loss of '60s optimism (the use of The Beach Boy song, Wouldn’t it be Nice? is truly inspired) and stares out at us through a smoggy sky looking to a future that, at least in 1975, must have seemed pretty hopeless.

BONUS MATERIAL

Every hetero hairdresser in Hollywood sought to be credited with being the inspiration for Shampoo's not-entirely-sympathetic George Roundy. Among the most vocal was '70s hairdresser to the stars and movie-producer-to-be Jon Peters.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014