A classic out on dvd finally...From Film Freak:


Tootsie is, to demonstrate, a remake of Hal Ashby's carefully directed 1975 classic Shampoo, except that it goes one step farther in feminizing the lead by putting him in drag--and takes a step backward in deciding the fallout of his deceptions. Shampoo makes fantasy out of Tootsie's ending, coming to terms with the reality of a lothario getting his foot caught in his own trap by giving the last word to The Beach Boys: "You know it seems the more we talk about it," they sing of unfeasible marital bliss in the film's closing song, "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "It only makes it worse to live without it."

This is a movie that tenders the domestication of Warren Beatty and then snatches the dream of a Saturday Evening Post existence from the tamed beast's grip; Shampoo's co-writer, producer, and star, Beatty's reputation as a ladies man has overshadowed his startling willingness to deconstruct that image and render himself impotent on screen time and again. (The finale of Shampoo feels like a self-imposed comeuppance for citing nineteenth-century playwright Douglas Jerrold's view of marriage to the press: "My notion of a wife at forty is that a man should be able to change her, like a bank note, for two twenties." The quote unfortunately stuck and is, as I write this, ascribed, sans tongue and cheek, to Beatty at the IMDb.) After Woody Allen, Beatty might be the seventies decade's second-most confessional motion-picture thespian. That said, as with Allen, objects in mirror may be more masturbatory than they appear.

What Beatty plays in Shampoo is George, a hairdresser transparently modelled on Jon Peters, the California stylist who married actress Lesley Ann Warren in 1967 and eventually hitched his caboose to the Barbra Streisand train, riding it straight to fame and fortune as the producer of Babs' 1976 remake of A Star Is Born. (He and Warren divorced the following year.) That's the vessel through which Beatty can rationalize George's overstated significance in the lives of his all-female (so far as we can tell) clientele, including an aspiring actress, Jill (Goldie Hawn), and the wife (Lee Grant), mistress (Julie Christie), and nymphet daughter (Carrie Fisher, pre-Star Wars) of the same man, a philanthropist--albeit one with a conservative bent--named Lester (Jack Warden). Unacquainted with the details of Lester's personal life, George has gone to him looking for a potential investor in a new salon.

Shampoo restores Beatty to the same precarious position he was in in Robert Altman's quasi-western McCabe & Mrs. Miller: he has romanticized his attraction to Julie Christie, and it's pushing her away. One can merely speculate where the two were in their off-screen affair at the point that George breaks down and tells Christie's Jackie something more robust than "I love you": "You're the only woman I trust." The irony of those words pouring from the mouth of an uncontainable, if unmalicious, womanizer moderately inverts the film: Beatty cum George--fairly, say I--would like his temptresses to claim some accountability. Set on the cusp of Steinem feminism, circa the 1968 elections (more or less because that's when co-scenarist Robert Towne began writing the screenplay), Shampoo portrays its women, perhaps controversially, as consenting victims, chiefly Jill, whose fragile ego precludes her seeing through George's translucent deceptions.

Still, the picture's women, Jill aside, might be its only significant failing. Although she won an Oscar for her performance, Grant never finds the soul of her character, while Christie fails to convince that George is not an option, despite that she's a kept woman. The problem with Shampoo's emotional ending is that 1968 L.A. is not the territory of McCabe & Mrs. Miller--George, like McCabe, is a half-bright prospector, Jackie, like Mrs. Miller, a whore, but their social subtext couldn't be more removed from the irrational West. The closing scene thus illustrates a duplicity in Beatty once again taking his lumps for on-camera and behind-the-scenes transgressions: it serves to turn an object of audience antipathy into one of pity, a louse into well-coiffed puppy dog. And it's from such slick manoeuvres that stars are born.

Columbia Tri-Star releases Shampoo on DVD in a second-rate presentation. With 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and cropped versions occupying the same side of a dual-layer disc, I wish they'd dropped the latter to update the bitrate of the former, which dips low at times, exacerbating the tungsten haze of Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography. A couple of shots at the beginning of chapter 15 are poor for a different reason, as they're off-register, producing a red-blue ghosting effect akin to an uncorrected 3-D image. On the other hand, I've never seen Shampoo this fresh-looking. The 2.0 mono soundtrack is clear; trailers for Mr. Deeds, Bugsy, and Cactus Flower (nope, none for Shampoo) fill out the platter.-Bill Chambers

I'm still waiting 4 the sequel... Condition

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[This message was edited Sat Mar 15 4:21:01 PST 2003 by unique]

June7 said:

It's supposed to be a trilogy, including Blow Dry.

I Dug "Shampoo"&I heard that Warren Beatty wanted to do something with Some Soul around this time possibly something with Richard Pryor that didn't come off.anyway this is a Cool Film.I also dug "Black Shampoo" which was a Riot IMHO.