FILMS/
SHAMPOO
Tributes
USA, 1975, 109 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Sat, May 3 / 4:00 / Kabuki / AWAR03K
CREDITS
- dir
-
Hal Ashby
- prod
-
Warren Beatty
- scr
-
Robert Towne, Warren Beatty
- cam
-
László Kovács
- editor
-
Robert C. Jones
- mus
-
Paul Simon
- cast
-
Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant, Carrie Fisher, Jack Warden
- source
-
Columbia Pictures, 10202 West Washington Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232-3195.
Set on the eve of Nixon’s 1968 election (and in production during his subsequent impeachment and pardon in 1974), Shampoo layers a sense of morning-after moral hangover under its astringent tale of permissive anything-goes Beverly Hills bed-hopping. The story centers around the amorous unraveling of George (Warren Beatty, riotously riffing on his off-screen Casanova reputation), a hairdresser who styles and sleeps with the bored rich ladies of Los Angeles, zipping from salon to mansion to bungalow on a Triumph motorcycle, his hairdryer at his waist like a sidearm. Girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn) is hoping they’ll settle down once George opens his own shop. Ex-girlfriend Jackie (Julie Christie), meanwhile, plays mistress to Lester (Jack Warden), whose wife Felicia (Lee Grant) wants her husband to invest in George’s new studio. Throughout, George sleeps with everyone but Lester (even bedding Lester’s teenage daughter, played by Carrie Fisher), and everyone save perhaps Jill is working some sort of angle. Naturally, this cannot but all come crashing down on George’s head. Robert Towne and Beatty’s unaffectedly shrewd Oscar-nominated script, coupled with committed turns by a great cast under Hal Ashby’s sure direction, gives thematic weight and moral ballast to what in lesser hands would be simple farce. That George’s protestation, “I don’t fuck anyone for money; I do it for fun,” could pass for idealism, and a naively doomed variety at that, is a measure of the film’s dark comic cynicism.
—Steve Mockus
