Shampoo (1975)

Director: Hal Ashby

Producer: Warren Beatty

Writers: Robert Towne; Warren Beatty

Actors: Warren Beatty; Julie Christie; Goldie Hawn; Lee Grant; Jack Warden; Tony Bill

Music: Paul Simon

Cinematography: László Kovács

Running time: 110 mins.

Rated: R

Beverly Hills  60s excess--- seen from the 70s.

       Shampoo is a satire on the narcissistic culture prevalent in the upper classes in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. It was made in 1975, so there was a several year period of reflection between the time depicted and the writing of the screenplay. Robert Towne and Warren Beatty, the writers knew what they were writing about having had direct experience with the subject matter. Towne was, and still is, the consumate L.A. writer (he wrote the screenplay for Chinatown), and Beatty is an actor who lived the culture of 1960s Hollywood/Beverly Hills. Both are Hollywood liberals, so the critique here is sharply directed at the self-absorbed, materialistic, hedonistic moneyed class they were very familiar with. The politics is blatant.

       The story takes place during one twenty-four hour period--- Election Day, November 4,1968--- hence the politics. Beatty plays George Roundy, a Beverly Hills hairdresser, who is trying to open his own salon while managing his overactive, multi-partnered sex life at the same time. George’s unrelenting heterosexual sex drive is beginning to catch up with him. He’s having simultaneous affairs with several women--- two of them the wife, Felicia, and the mistress, Jackie, of Lester Karpf (Jack Warden), a Beverly Hills millionaire businessman who George is hoping will help finance his business venture. George is ambitious and thinks he using his conquests to further his own ends; but not being the brightest guy on the block, he doesn’t realize that he’s just being exploited by these bored, unsatisfied, frustrated rich women. He winds up getting dumped by all of them and finding himself alone on a hill above Mulholland Drive after Jackie (Julie Christie), the one he really cared for, goes off with the money (Lester). 

          The social comments in this film are strong--- and the political even more so. Lester, the rich Republican businessman and Nixon supporter, who claims to be concerned about the disintegration of the moral fiber of our society, drives around in a Rolls Royce listening to stock reports while his wife Felicia (Lee Grant) wiles away her time in beauty salons--- when she’s not having sex with George. Lester is unfaithful to his wife with a woman who is unfaithful to him; and his daughter Lorna (Carrie Fisher) plays tennis all day and solicits sex from men she barely knows (George again). He may be a shrewd businessman, but he’s not sharp enough to notice that he’s being cuckolded twice, or maybe thrice--- if you include his daughter. Everybody in this movie is either using someone, and/or being used by someone.

        There are two Election Night parties the principal characters attend that spotlight the political divide prevalent at the time in upper L.A. society (a divide that is still with us). One is an old-line, conservative Republican reception at the Bistro on Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills. The attendees are older well-heeled establishment types. Pictures of Nixon, Agnew and Reagan abound as the partygoers await the intended victory. The other is at a private residence in Benedict Canyon attended by hip, young and seemingly liberal types--- also well-heeled and loose. But here alcohol, drugs, and sex are the order as opposed to the stuffy, ridiculousness evident at the Bistro. Both worlds depicted here are out of touch with reality and the problems afflicting the country at that time.

           Nixon is the elephant in the room in Shampoo. He’s everywhere lurking in the background, just waiting to take over. The year 1968 was when the sharp, political and social divisions in this country became deadly evident. It witnessed the assassinations of King and Kennedy, the riots that followed, the Chicago Democratic Convention debacle, and a war that refused to end. The New Frontier and the Great Society were coming to an end. Nixon was elected on the day this movie takes place with the slogan “Bring us together”; and from the vantage point of 1975 when the movie was made, and knowing what was to come: five more years of war in Vietnam, Watergate, and the eventual resignations of both Nixon and Agnew, it was obvious that that did not happen.

Note: See my overviews of Model Shop and Zabriskie Point for two other views of that pivotal year 1968 in L.A. 

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Director: Robert Aldrich

Writer: A. I. Bezzerides

Based on: Kiss Me Deadly, a novel by Mickey Spillane

Actors: Ralph Meeker; Albert Dekker; Paul Stewart; Juano Hernandez; Cloris Leachman; Maxine Cooper; Gaby Rodgers

Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo

Music: Frank DeVol

Running Time: 106 mins.

L.A. Noir Apocalypse

             Kiss Me Deadly is a 1950s detective story; at least that’s what it appears to be--- it’s more. Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides took Mickey Spillane’s lurid pulp  private eye novel and made it into something else: a critique on the Cold War American political/social mindset of the 1950s. They took Spillane’s two-dimensional characters and his standard pulp fiction plot and gave them cosmic significance.

               The story deals with detective Mike Hammer’s (Ralph Meeker) quest across L.A. for a mysterious box containing something important that several people have died for. Greedy and unscrupulous Hammer thinks it might be “something big”, something valuable, but is totally unaware of what it really is---dangerous nuclear material capable of blowing L.A. and possibly the rest of the world to kingdom come. Hammer’s obsessive quest forms the matrix for Man’s obsessive journey to ultimate destruction. This movie more than any other 50s film, with the possible exception of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), best epitomizes the doomsday paranoia of the period.

                 Hammer’s quest begins when one night he picks up a woman hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman) on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She tells him her name is Christina and that people are chasing her. Mike grudgingly offers to drop her off at the nearest bus stop, but they are intercepted by several gangster types who knock Mike out, torture and murder Christina, and leave him unconscious in his wrecked sports car.

                 Upon recovery and released from the hospital, Mike sets out, haunted by Christina’s memory and her last words to him “ remember me”, to track down the “something big” she died for--- or the “great whatsit” as his assistant/girlfriend, Velda (Maxine Cooper) calls it.

                  In the course of his odyssey through mid-1950s Los Angeles Hammer meets an assortment of characters: a wily boxing promoter, a nervous truck driver, a cagey morgue assistant, a philosophical furniture mover; sarcastic apartment managers; an opera enthusiast, gangsters, an extremely deadly femme fatale, and various other strange types. Some are helpful, but most, especially the gangsters and the police, try to discourage him from his pursuit; but pig-headed, avaricious Mike takes no heed. In the end he finds what he’s looking for, but the big payoff turns out to be a nuclear apocalypse. The movie ends with him and Velda fleeing into the Pacific Ocean as the Malibu beach house where they were being held by the mysterious and sinister Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker) and his gangster minions erupts in a nuclear reaction.

               For Aldrich and Bezzerides, political leftists, Spillane’s pulp novel Mike Hammer with his latent fascist inclinations symbolized what they felt was wrong with America at that time of political witch hunts and McCarthy hearings. Instead of Spillane’s hero figure this movie version of him is anything but heroic. Hammer is self-centered and narcissistic, as Christina so aptly tags him. He likes the good life: sharp sports cars, a comfortable art-bedecked apartment, and fancy up-to-date gadgets (e.g. a tape operated answering machine decades before they became available to the public)--- and he’s not particular how he gets it. He uses Velda shamefully, taking advantage of her affection for him by pimping her out to get dirt for his divorce clients. He roughs up old men, insults women, and enjoys inflicting pain. He symbolizes the pettiness of those of us with assumed superior egos. And he, like the rest of us, is too concerned with his own little world to realize what’s going on in the greater world around him. His pettiness in the end will bring down the curtain on us all.

              Kiss Me Deadly is a remarkable piece of filmmaking on several different levels. The utter unreality of the style is unique. Almost everything in the movie seems to be out of joint. The whole film has a dreamlike quality that causes the viewer to doubt what he’s seeing and hearing. Camera angles are off, dialogues seem unnatural, sequences appear to have incongruities and odd time lapses. The opening credits tell right off that this movie is not ordinary--- they’re reversed. They move from bottom to top, not in the expected order. The L.A. portrayed is a strange place located between reality and fantasy.

               This movie is a cautionary tale, and Aldrich and Bezzerides artfully use mythological and classical allusions throughout the film to express the eternal truths and cataclysmic  message they want to relate. Hammer’s investigation is nothing less than a trip into the underworld, and a journey through the labyrinth. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, he even picks up a “golden bough” (in the wheel of his car) upon his entrance, but foolishly discards it, thereby sealing his fate. The “great whatsit” is the fatal box containing the Medusa’s head and guarded by Cerberus the hound of hell. And Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers), Soberin’s femme fatale associate and the woman who out of curiosity and lust opens the deadly box, is no other than Pandora herself bringing ultimate woe and destruction into the world. Who would have thought that a 1950s rather run of the mill film noir could be so ingeniously contrived?

                Besides its oddness and offbeat artistry, Kiss Me Deadly has one more very important element to offer the modern viewer: it’s a cinematic time capsule of a long-gone Los Angeles. Dwight Eisenhower was president, take-cover drills were a common occurrence in most schools, and in a couple of years backyard bomb shelters would be all the rage. L.A. was changing fast and Hammer’s quest gives us a last view of what was about to pass away. Hammer does most of his investigating on Bunker Hill--- the former Bunker Hill of decrepit Victorian mansions, rickety old hotels, decaying apartment buildings, and the original Angel’s Flight. His travels also take him from his up-scale apartment building (still there) in a then sparsely populated Westwood, to a gangster’s estate in Beverly Hills (Greystone Mansion), a black lounge in South Central, the Hollywood Athletic Club (still there), a gas station in Calabasas, and finally to a spectacular explosive ending in the surf in Malibu.

                  Kiss Me Deadly is a one of a kind movie. Once you see it your opinion of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking as formulaic and unimaginative will be forever altered.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Producers: Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Lupi, Joanne Sellar

Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson

Actors: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman, Mary Lynn Rajskub

Cinematographer: Robert Elswit

Music: Jon Brion           

Rating: R

Running: 95 mins.

 Valley punch drunk comédie humaine

          Paul Thomas Anderson is a Valley Guy (Studio City) and most of his early movies take place there: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and this one Punch-Drunk Love. For Anderson his native San Fernando Valley is a place just a bit off center--- near Hollywood, on the other side of Beverly Hills and Bel Air, but continents away in ambience and worldview. It’s a place inhabited by second-tier T.V. people, porno workers, want-a-be’s and has-beens. Anderson’s Valley is very removed from the middle-class suburban image once applied to this disconnected third of L.A. located over the hill. His characters are misfits of a sort--- people who just don’t seem to belong anywhere; they live in the Valley because it’s the Valley. The misfit protagonist of Punch-Drunk Love, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is just such a person.

        Barry is a small businessman who lives in Sherman Oaks and sells toilet plungers out of his warehouse in Chatsworth. He is a total neurotic, on the verge of a complete mental collapse owing to the fact of having been raised the only boy with seven deprecating sisters. He collects frequent flyer miles by buying large amounts of products he doesn't need (Healthy Choice pudding for instance)--- this in  spite of the fact he doesn't go anywhere and doesn't eat pudding. He has no social life, is nervous, quirky, and has uncontrolled fits of anger and crying. His sisters treat him as if he were an idiot and consider him a born loser. His rather incompetent co-workers seem mystified by him, and his foreman Lance (Luis Gúzman)--- a Latino named Lance!!--- appears to be his only friend.

          Things begin to turn around for Barry when he meets Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), a friend of one of his sisters. Lena saw Barry in a photo and was determined to meet him. She thought he looked interesting--- Lena is not your typical match-up. After a shaky start they hit it off.

          But then things get a bit rough. Just before Lena came into his life, Barry, to ease his loneliness and be able to talk to someone, in desperation called a phone sex line and wound up being extorted by the lowlife scammers on the other end. This turns out to be quite serious when the extortionists send four knuckle-brained thugs to collect whatever they can get out of him. 

          When Lena is slightly injured in a car accident caused by the extortion collectors, Barry, now totally in love, and superhumanly empowered, beats the hell out of the thugs, takes Lena to a hospital, and having previously found out the location of the scammers, heads for Provo, Utah, phone in hand, to confront the sex line “supervisor” Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a local mattress salesman. Barry and Dean have a heated shouting match ending in a stand-off when Dean realizes he’s dealing with a total nut job. Barry returns to L.A. and seeks out Lena to apologize for leaving her alone at the hospital. She hesitates at first, but then invites him into her apartment. The movie ends with Lena saying, “So, here we go,” as the two of them play a tune on a harmonium.

            This movie has a lot going for it. The structure is quirky, the casting is off-beat (Adam Sandler--- who would have known?) and the humor outrageous. The film is divided into several segments by unusual pastel colored interludes, and the discordant music score definitely fits the quirky mood. Anderson creates characters, who would be funny anywhere, but because this story takes place in the Valley, seem to touch a special nerve for Angelenos who happen to live there--- myself included. 

            What Valleyite cannot identify with Barry lost in the all-too typical labyrinthine halls of Lena’s apartment complex trying to find his way back to her. These gargantuan rabbit warrens dominate the south Valley, my own area of Studio City is full of them. And how about  the utter quiet desolation of the industrial zone of Chatsworth at dawn? Whoever has worked there at night, as I have, can testify what a sudden horrific street noise can do to your nerves. Eckhart Auto on Canoga Avenue, by the way, became world famous owing to its few seconds appearance in the movie. Other places and street names featured in the film also add a touch of reality to this very un-real love story: Barry and Lena’s first date is at the Petit Chateau in North Hollywood (a well-known Valley restaurant, and a favorite of the late Bob Hope), and Barry’s residence is on Moorpark Street, where all the thirty-somethings--- along with the forty-year old virgin--- live

            What Dickens in his novels did for his Victorian London and its lowlife, and Balzac his nineteenth century Paris and its bourgeois middle class, Anderson, in his movies, does for his twenty first century San Fernando Valley and its over-the hill inhabitants: he gives us a look at L.A.’s backyard and the human comedy that can be found there.