THE GO-BETWEEN 1971

"You flew too near the sun; you were scorched."

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for discussion

Gee, I can’t imagine why one of my most beloved and cherished films from the early 1970s is a movie about a sheltered and naïve adolescent boy who becomes hopelessly infatuated with Julie Christie.

Well, perhaps I can.

To anyone who knows me, it’s hardly a secret, and indeed, has become something of an overbelabored point, that I have been ga-ga over Julie Christie since I was a pre-teen...way back in the days when The Beatles were still together.  

What started out for me at eleven years old as a mere crush after seeing Julie Christie on screen for the first time in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) has only grown more adulatory and devoted over the years. My admiration for Christie's talent and twitterpated enchantment with her beauty found echoed justification with each successive film. 

The face that stared out at me from our living room coffee table

Though (paradoxically) I think Julie Christie tends to shine most brilliantly in period films, it has always been her distinctly contemporary quality that most defined her appeal to me. Combining a direct, emotional honesty with assured intelligence, wit, sexual independence, and self-possession, Julie Christie seemed to me the very embodiment of the modern image of woman in film. An image updated and of a very different stripe than the Hollywood leading ladies I grew up watching.

Looking back, it's quite a sobering thing to reflect that I’ve been absolutely, unabatedly besotted with Julie Christie for more than half a century.

And The Go-Between is all about reflecting.

By beating out Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice for the Grand Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, The Go-Between’s win represented a distinct personal-rivalry victory for director Joseph Losey. But the prestigious Palme d’Or ultimately failed to work its magic at the American boxoffice or hold much sway with Academy voters, for the film was largely a critical success and received only the scantest Oscar attention (a Best Supporting Actress nod for Margaret Laighton was the film’s sole Oscar nod). 

I saw The Go-Between in 1972, when I was 14, and recall being surprised—what with the above-the-title Christie and Bates paired for the first time since Madding Crowd—that the film’s focus was not on its adult characters, but on the experiences of a boy very nearly my age. And though nothing about the story’s timeline and setting (England, 1900) suggested I should encounter anything even remotely relevant to me, my life, or limited frame of experience, I was thrilled to discover just how much the film truly resonated with me personally.

I don't recall ever before having the experience of feeling that I both understood and could relate to the inner nature of a character whose life, while nothing like my own, nevertheless held several canny and "I thought I was the only one who felt that way!" parallels… parallels far and beyond the whole “adolescent crush on the exquisite Julie Christie” angle.

Julie Christie as Marian Maudsley

Alan Bates as Ted Burgess

Dominic Guard as Lionel "Leo" Colston

Margaret Leighton as Mrs. Madeleine Maudsley

Edward Fox as Viscount Hugh Trimingham

Michael Gough as Mr. Maudsley

The Go-Between is a picturesque and commendably faithful adaptation of the 1953 novel by L. P. Hartley (author of The Hireling). Directed by Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony, Boom!) from a literate script by playwright Harold Pinter, The Go-Between marks the duo’s third and final collaboration, following their synergistic partnership on the films The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). 

The titular Go-Between of the story is Lionel “Leo” Colston (Dominic Guard), a sensitive, earnestly sincere 12-year-old of a somewhat dreamy nature that all-too-easily—and injuriously—lends itself to a kind of emotional fragility and flights of superstitious fancy. Out of a need to feel he has some power over his life—his father recently died, his mother’s finances are strained, and he’s bullied at school—Leo places great stock in the determining forces of the Zodiac, half-convincing himself that he has the power to levy magical curses.

Marcus Maudsley (Richard Gibson) introduces an anxious Leo to Brandham Hall.
Their modes of dress highlight the stark differences (among them, class and the
 unearned self-assurance of wealth) between the schoolmates

The course of Leo’s life changes irrevocably when he accepts an invitation from a wealthy classmate to spend a sweltering summer at the latter's family’s baronial country estate, Brandham Hall—a sprawling, Gosford Park-ish affair that, by the looks of it, takes up a sizable chunk of Norfolk, England. There, Leo, an outsider unversed in the caste-specific rules and obligations of the upper classes, becomes the unwitting and naively complicit facilitator in a scandalously illicit affair between the aristocratically betrothed Marian (Julie Christie) and Ted, a working-class tenant farmer (Alan Bates), when he’s elected as the covert couple’s letter-carrying liaison.

Leo is so dazzled, he's blinded.

Set in the Edwardian Era and told from Leo’s fish-out-of-water perspective, The Go-Between is most manifestly a turn-of-the-century coming-of-age story that offers a trenchant indictment of the rigid, suppressive constraints of the British class system. But through Pinter’s insertion of brief, melancholy flashforwards to the late 1950s—wherein we encounter Leo as a sad-eyed adult (Michael Redgrave) and learn that what we’re watching are his memories of that fateful summer—it becomes clear that The Go-Between is also a reckoning-with-the-past story.

Michael Redgrave as the adult Leo Colston

Thanks to Gosford Park, Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age, and, most significantly, the Merchant-Ivory films, period costume dramas are now as familiar to American audiences as the Western.

But back in the early ‘70s, they were still something of a rarified genre, typically coming in one of two varieties: mouldily old-fashioned Oscar-bait (Nicholas and Alexandra -1970, Ryan’s Daughter - 1970) or highbrow deconstructivist (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis -1970, Death in Venice -1971).

The Go-Between most determinedly qualifies as the latter. In their thematically exacting adaptation of Hartley’s often misunderstood novel, Losey and Pinter use the temporal beauty of a meticulously recreated, period-romantic world to beguile the viewer (as it does Leo) before pulling the Victorian rug out from under us, revealing the dappled gentility of The Go-Between to be mere window dressing masking a tale of lacerating emotional brutality and psychological trauma rivaling anything in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  or Last Summer. 

That Noise You Hear Is the Sound of Illusions Shattering
Reality inevitably intrudes upon Leo's blinkered idealization of Marian and Ted  

1970s cinema distinguished itself as the age of disenchantment, unhappy endings, and antiheroes, making The Go-Between—a tale without heroes, set in a world full of hypocrisy, class elitism, and the callous manipulation of the vulnerable by the wealthy—a perfect Nixon-era zeitgeist piece.

Moral ambivalence is also a characteristic of '70s cinema

Lacking a male figure in his life, Leo responds to the paternal kindness of the two very different men in love with Marian—Ted, whom she loves but cannot wed, and Hugh, to whom she's obliged to wed, but does not love. Leo is faced with a moral dilemma when his go-between duties come into conflict with his conscience. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What I love about this film? Well, Julie Christie, of course — as commanding a screen presence as ever — in a role that finds her once again finding the humanity in a superficial character and leveraging her sirenic beauty with chilling assurance. The word "chilling" points to one of the top reasons The Go-Between captured my imagination as a youth, and why it has remained a film I never tire of revisiting. 

With its dark subtext and its setting used as a dominant, active participant in the narrative, watching The Go-Between is like watching a Gothic fairy tale (a Sunshine Gothic, if such a thing exists). 

Against a backdrop of bright daylight, frilly frocks, and posh British accents, Leo, like Wonderland’s Alice and Oz’s Dorothy, is introduced as an innocent transported to an unfamiliar world where his adventures lead to a harsh moral education, resulting in a devastating psychological reckoning/loss of innocence. 

Michel Legrand’s lushly romantic, subtly ominous score for The Go-Between (replacing composer Richard Rodney Bennett) contributes invaluably to the film's mounting sense of dread. With each new lie told, each risk endeavored, and each confidence unstably guarded, Legrand's melodramatic piano motif drives home the tense certainty that none of this can end well.

The Go Between is the 2nd of four films that
Alan Bates and Julie Christie would make together

And speaking of tense...one aspect of the film's psychological tension that registered more acutely in the film than in the novel is the way in which The Go-Between plays with the viewer's alliances. Initially, Marian and Ted, as lovers thwarted by the draconian inanities of classism, are the objects of sympathy. But with the introduction of Hugh, someone we expect to be the problematic "other guy," but who is, in actuality, a decent, likable, and quite dashing fellow, the lovebirds' actions come off as deceitful and cruel. 

Looming large over Leo in this shot are the two differing
ideals of masculine identity that Hugh and Ted represent  

Then there's social-climbing Mrs. Maudsley, who, though ceaselessly shooting daggers of distrust at her daughter, is nevertheless all hospitality and egalitarian graces when it comes to lower-class Leo. So... despite my empathizing with the difficult position he has been placed in, during a scene where Leo engages in an ill-masked deception, telling a bald-faced lie to the woman who had heretofore only shown him kindness, my heart went out to Mrs. Maudsley. 

From the novel: 

Leo - “I saw how green I must have looked to her and how easy to take advantage.”  

It's Not Easy Being Green

The gift of a Lincoln green summer suit (from Lincoln, England, the shade associated with Robin Hood)—an act of kindness that endears Marian to Leo and engenders his loyalty—comes to take on the hue of something tarnished when Leo learns from his friend: “It’s green [referring to a bike Miriam intends to give Leo on his birthday...to help him deliver messages faster] Bright green. And you know why? Because you are green yourself. It’s your true color. Marian said so herself.”

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Cinematographer Gerry Fisher (Secret Ceremony, Fedora) imbues The Go-Between with a studied romanticism that reinforces the film’s picturesque setting while shoring up its darker psychological themes. The film's visual texture, designed to transport the viewer to a time and place distant and alien from the present—making tangible the novel’s famous opening line, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”—also establishes the film's narrative perspective; we’re seeing this world through Leo’s eyes.  

Glowingly honey-colored and sun-dappled at the start (the tale is set, significantly, at the turn of the century…Leo’s innocence standing in for pre-war England’s optimism), the film grows incrementally gloomier (radiant sunshine giving way to torrential rainstorms) in coincident conveyance of Leo’s disenchantment and loss of innocence.  

Leo checks the mercury thermometer daily, believing that, though
the power of his will, he can induce the summer heat to rise 

The concepts of fate and destiny are poignant, cross-purpose leitmotifs in The Go-Between. Fate's neutral dominance and intractability are symbolized by nature, while destiny manifests as the misdirected efforts of characters who believe (fallaciously) that they have control over the outcome of events. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As an adolescent, I felt isolated as a middle-class Black kid in white-majority neighborhoods and schools; lonely because, despite having four sisters, I lacked someone to talk to; shy, which became my survival skill as a gay teenager; and lacking a male guidance figure since my mom had recently remarried, making my stepfather still somewhat of a stranger. I also had an inner life that felt more authentic to me than my outer reality. 

Movies became my refuge, escape, and discovery. 

I approached The Go-Between seeking escape, but instead, discovered a white, British, fin de siècle version of myself reflected back at me. In a Norfolk suit, no less. 

Leo's Monumentally Unlucky 13th Birthday

Scenes depicting Leo’s outsider’s awareness of being “in” Brandham Hall but not “of” Brandham Hall reminded me of every I'm-the-only-Black-person-in-the-room experience I had growing up. Just as my being a child of the H-bomb-anxiety '60s (the root of all those fantasy TV sitcoms of the day: My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie) made me relate to the coping mechanism comfort Leo finds in the quick-fix, wish-fulfillment belief in possessing magic powers.

Have To Believe We Are Magic
Until I saw this movie, I didn't know that the desire for magical powers is a common fantasy in children. I once failed to study for an upcoming test at school and wished-wished-wished to get sick overnight so I could stay home. No such luck. But when I got to school the next day, the TEACHER was sick, and we had a sub...and no test!!
At the time, you could not have convinced me it wasn't all my doing. 

As I was an internal, self-serious kind of kid, I particularly identified with Leo's idealization of adults. With me, it manifested in a tendency towards being crush-prone whenever any grown-up paid me the slightest bit of attention (in grade school, I fell in love with a teacher who happened to look just like Sally Kellerman, simply because she asked for my help rolling the film strip projector cart back to the AV room).

A scene that’s always intrigued me is the one where all the Brandham Hall boys are off swimming, and Leo, who doesn't know how, is off to the side, sneaking a peek at Ted, who is sunbathing in the nude. The scene is ambiguous, leaving the viewer free to interpret, on Leo’s part, either a natural curiosity about a stranger (he and Ted have not yet met) who is relaxed and comfortable in himself, or an equally natural adolescent sexual curiosity. Being that I’ve always been of the mind that Alan Bates could arouse sexual curiosity in a rock, I saw it as the latter, projecting another point of identification with the character of Leo.

It's a perception that felt, if not “correct,” then perhaps validated when, in later years, after finally reading The Go-Between, I learned that author L.P. Hartley was gay and based his book on a summer he spent at an estate in Norfolk called Bradenham Hall when he was sixteen. It seemed Hartley only publicly acknowledged his sexual identity late in life, and in 1971, published The Harness Room, his only gay-themed novel. 

PERFORMANCES

OK, what can I say about La Christie that I haven't already covered in the NINE essays already posted about her films?  Julie Christie is marvelous in The Go-Between, and of her performance I contend that if it can be said she possesses a niche gift, it's her peerless ability to inhabit and humanize (without trying to make them likable) characters who are blithely cruel. (Christy's Kitty Baldy from 1983's The Return of the Soldier [with Alan Bates] is like Marian Maudsley...the later years.)

18-year-old Dominic Guard in Picnic at Hanging Rock -1975

The Go-Between is a reminder of what a tremendous impact a well-cast leading child's role can have on a film (the young actors in 1972's The Other and that TV version of The Shining ruined both movies for me). Dominic Guard is perfection...simply because his natural, unaffected reactions feel as nascent as everything about Leo and his sense of self. Contrasted with the young actor who plays Leo in the 2015 BBC-One adaptation of The Go-Between: the kid is excellent...but he's acting the hell out of the part, and I was never unaware of that fact. 

The Go-Between, as realized by Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, is for me a near-perfect screen adaptation of Hartley's heartbreaking novel, capturing both the beauty and the brutality of the story.

Of course, it isn't lost on me that my revisit to this movie some 54 years after my first experience of it, fittingly parallels the film's flashforward sequences that have adult Leo returning to "the scene of the crime" of the death of his innocence.

Happily, that's where the parallels end, for when I look at this 1971 masterpiece now, I feel more keenly than ever its humanist soul. The world that my 68-year-old eyes look out at today seems in a race to make a virtue of what is most weak in us (our capacity for cruelty) while turning the only true strength humans have (our compassion) into a liability.

The Go-Between is like a cautionary tale, reminding me of the damage that's inflicted by oppressive social structures, and what's at stake for humanity when we forget that we really should handle one another with a great deal more care. 

Clip from "The Go-Between" (1971)

BONUS MATERIAL

May December (2023)

Michel Legrand's mesmerizing score for The Go-Between was used to evocatively melodramatic effect when it was reorchestrated and adapted by composer Marcelo Zarvos for the Todd Haynes film May December, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.

The Go-Between (2015)

Randy old sod that I am, the only improvement I could find in the faithful, perfectly serviceable TV adaptation of The Go-Between is that it grants us several Leo 's-eye-view shots of Ted Burgess (Ben Batt) in the altogether. Broadcast in September 2015, this version features Vanessa Redgrave and Jim Broadbent as old Marian and old Leo, respectively.

The Go-Between opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 13, 1971  

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2025

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