Shampoo was hit the screen in 1974, but it's set in 1968 on the day Nixon is about to be elected. It's a sex farce, supposedly based (loosely) on a Restoration comedy. Warren Beatty (sporting one of the best hairdos ever) plays George, a hairdresser that men assume to be gay. The women all know better, especially Jackie (Julie Christie), Jill (Goldie Hawn), and Felicia (Lee Grant). So, apparently, does a quite young Carrie Fisher. Felicia is the wife of Lester (Jack Warden), from whom George hopes to get some money to set up his own hairdressing business. Jackie is George's former girlfriend and now Lester's mistress. Jill is George's current steady, not that he's loyal to anybody, as he makes it with all three of them in the course of the movie. I hope I have the relationships right.
Women want George. All of them. Carrie Fisher's comment is bleeped out of the trailer below, but I'll bet you know what it is. George wants them, too, but what about true love? Will George ever find it? Will he grow up? If you think you know the answers, you must have seen the movie, because this isn't like any current romantic comedy. I don't want to say too much more. It's very funny, and the cast is great. I believe Lee Grant won an Oscar for her performance, and the movie was nominated in a lot of categories. The script by Robert Towne's very good. Hal Ashby directed. It was a big hit when it was released, but now it appears to be pretty much forgotten. If you haven't seen it, check it out.
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First, a little personal reminiscence. When Judy and I moved to Brownwood, Texas, for my first teaching gig after grad school, it was quite a culture shock to go from a place like Austin, with lots of movie theaters, to a place that had only one. This explains how we came to see The Legend of Boggy Creek, but that's another story. Not too long after our move, a new duplex theater opened at a little shopping center, and $ was the first film show in one half of the duplex. We were looking forward to the movie, but we didn't see it. The theater flooded. A problem with the air-conditioning, I believe.
That struck me as an interesting coincidence because it was the second time I'd been to opening night when the theater flooded. The first was many years before, when the new theater in my hometown had opened. The a/c was the problem then, too.
And at yet another time I was in a theater that flooded. It was a fairly new one, though I don't believe this was opening night. It was my freshman year in college, and the student union theater flooded because of flash flooding all over the city. What is it with me and flooding in theaters, anyway?
Now to our regularly scheduled feature. You can see the problem with this movie immediately, right? Who names a movie $? Maybe back in the early '70s when this movie came out, the studio thought that a movie starring Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty didn't even need a title to be a hit. They were wrong, though.
Not that Beatty and Hawn (both with wonderful '70s haircuts) aren't a delight. They are, and so are Scott Brady and Gert Frobe (with lots of little Goldfinger in-jokes). The plot's not bad. It's a caper, with Beatty stealing from criminals, aided by Hawn's hooker with a heart of gold. Naturally the crooks aren't happy, and complications ensue. The film's finale is one really long chase scene, followed by a double twist. Or is it a triple twist? I don't remember.
This is one of those movies that didn't do well at the time, or at least not nearly as well as expected. But it's fun and worth a look if you need some lighthearted entertainment, as who doesn't now and then?
