Cinema: Blow Dry

SHAMPOO

Directed by HAL ASHBY

Screenplay by ROBERT TOWNE and WARREN BEATTY

Shampoo is a problem. At its best moments it is crafty, funny and high-spirited, but sometimes—even simultaneously—it is wormy and disingenuous. Just when a hard edge is crucial, the people who made it fall away from their best instincts and strongest insights into gross sentimentality.

Warren Beatty, who produced Shampoo and took a strong hand in the script, appears as a satyric—if not entirely satiric—Beverly Hills hairdresser named George, whose specialty is a nifty cut and a fast bedding for selected clients. George has a lot of energy, most of it focused on sex. He displays a kind of surface tenderness toward his women, although what undoubtedly makes him so successful in his conquests is that he looks like Warren Beatty. The movie might even be titled Advertisements for Myself. In any event, Shampoo concerns the day (election evening of 1968, to be precise) when George’s little kingdom comes crashing down round his shag.

The film’s form is fast bedroom farce. George’s women swirl in and out of the shop where he works as resident genius and prima donna, in and out of the addled life he can barely control. Jackie (Julie Christie), a former girl friend, is currently the mistress of Lester (Jack Warden), an investor whom George hopes to hit for money to open his own shop. Meanwhile, George is conducting a fairly frenzied dalliance with Lester’s wife Felicia (Lee Grant). His more or less regular girl of the moment, a model named Jill (Goldie Hawn), just tries to get a moment of his time. As the genre requires, all furtive alliances are exposed and prices are paid.

Sardonic Metaphor. That is just the trouble. As played, deftly, by Beatty, George is an affable con man who goes no deeper than his own hypocrisy. The reason, presumably, for setting the movie in 1968 is to groom George, the last shabby survivor of the age of grooviness, into a sardonic metaphor. There are many references to the Nixon election, and at times the movie appears to be attempting a delineation of the moral neutrality that could produce a Nixon and a Watergate.

To keep such an ambition from being more than facile presumption, Beatty and his co-writer Robert Towne (Chinatown) and Director Hal Ashby (The Last Detail) would have needed all their wit about them. All through the movie, though, their attitude toward George wavers. When he bemoans to Jill the general poverty of his life, it sounds like just another of his ploys to mollify an anxious, angry woman. But the end of Shampoo subverts what has gone before. George discovers that Jackie is his one true love and he blubbers out a proposal —marriage, kids, the whole number —that reveals him as more sensitive than he ever could, or should, be. Jackie turns him down and departs for Acapulco with her rich investor. George is left on a small canyon hilltop with a beautifully sad Paul Simon melody underscoring his dubious desolation, inviting sympathy at what should have been the richest joke of all.

The ending is a betrayal of all that is best in the film, revealing that the film makers have been interested in apologizing for George, not satirizing him. Still, much of Shampoo is good enough to make one regret its ultimate failure. The overpriced lassitude of Southern California living is well caught. Much of the dialogue has a keen edge (“I’ve been cutting too much hair lately,” George rues at one point. “I’m losing all my concept”). The acting—especially Grant and Warden and Carrie Fisher, who appears as their nubile daughter—is well observed and sprightly. But Shampoo wants it both ways. It wants a few laughs off George and wants, too, to bare his sensitive, desperate soul. It turns out that he is a figure looking for pity, and it hardly seems worth it.

Jay Cocks