I’ve been a little unsatisfied with my streaming TV options lately (and unwilling to spring for more subscriptions), so I’ve been watching a lot of old movies. I streamed Best-Picture winner Crash (2004), which I somehow managed to miss when it was released, and which I found to be a strangely fevered movie in its depiction of racial tensions, one that would surely have been regarded as unduly triggering had it been released a decade later. Crash should have lost the 2005 Oscar to the magnificent Brokeback Mountain. I also rewatched Inside Man (2006), an overlooked bank heist picture directed by Spike Lee, who is a very great filmmaker. (Helps to have a cast with Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Plummer, and Chiwetel Ejiofor.) We tend to think of Lee as a chronicler of black life, but he’s an extraordinary cinematic storyteller across genres and demography; check out his 2002 gem 25 Hours with Edward Norton.
I also finally got around to seeing Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) starring Gene Hackman, Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) starring Warren Beatty, and Brian DePalma’s Blow Out (1981) starring John Travolta. All intriguing, deeply conspiratorial, and marked by starkly pessimistic endings. And all sleepers that didn’t do particularly well at the box office but commanded respect in the decades that followed. They were part of that post-Vietnam Watergate generation with a deeply suspicious view of institutional power.
The movie I’ve found myself thinking about most since I watched it, though, is Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975), also starring Beatty, ably assisted by Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie, Lee Grant, and a young Carrie Fisher. From the late sixties (with Bonnie and Clyde) to the early eighties (with Reds), Beatty was Hollywood royalty, a bankable movie star who was typically deeply involved in writing, directing, and producing movies, whether or not his name was on the credits (he’s listed as a screenwriter of Shampoo with Robert Towne, who wrote Chinatown, another one of those conspiratorial thrillers). Beatty’s filmography is relatively slim for a star whose career spans six decades, in part because he was a perfectionist. While a bona fide hit, Shampoo is another one of those movies that got middling reviews at the time but has earned a place in film history as an important cinematic document.
Beatty plays George Roundby, a gorgeous hair stylist who has no problem getting laid but has a lot of difficulty in being taken seriously by those in a position to finance his dream of opening his own salon. One person who can do so is Lester (played by the terrific and extraordinarily durable character actor Jack Warden), which is complicated because George is secretly sleeping with his wife, mistress, and daughter. This is a movie that would never fly in a post-Me-Too era, and the legendary Lothario Beatty, who finally settled down with Annette Bening in 1992, was lucky to have been a septuagenarian by the 2010s.
Though nominally a farce, Shampoo is a serious, even melancholy, movie. One important indication of its political subtext is that the film is set on November 5, 1968—the day Richard Nixon was elected president. This is an unmistakable motif throughout: there are Nixon posters on the street, Nixon speeches as background noise, and election returns unfolding as the main characters head for a collision at a fancy political dinner. At first I thought this would be a matter of I-told-you-so storytelling in that the film was shot during the culmination of Nixon’s Watergate disgrace in the summer of 1974. And Beatty was a high-profile Nixon hater who fundraised energetically for George McGovern in 1972 (perhaps not realizing it was elite Beverly Hills types like him—Shampoo is set there—that led millions of voters to choose the never especially loveable Nixon). But there’s little sense of triumph in the movie for George Roundby or his creators in 1975. The overall vibe from SoCal of the seventies is paradise lost, one that would perhaps reach its apotheosis a year later with the release of Hotel California by the Eagles.
By then, Hollywood was retooling is message in seeking to channel an incipient change in the national mood. Shampoo a signature movie of 1975; 1976 belonged to Rocky. The year after that it was Star Wars. Though in many ways the late seventies were still perceived as an age of malaise, a trend was taking root. By the mid-eighties, the vibe of Conversation/Parallax/Blowout was over. Reagan was king.
I still don’t quite know how I feel about Shampoo. It seems a little self-indulgent and yet marked by a real sense of craft. Beatty wondered if the republic could survive Nixon. It did. Maybe it will also survive the new disaster on the horizon.