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Shampoo

Directed by HAL ASHBY

Starring WARREN BEATTY JULIE CHRISTIE GOLDIE HAWN

1975 Released 5 NOV Blu-ray

There’s real pain, sham friends, and even some champagne in , Hal Ashby’s saga of superstar hairdresser George (Warren Beatty), California’s goofiest lothario. It was the top-grossing movie for Columbia Pictures in 1975; it was also one of the decade’s prime cultural movers, helping to enhance and clarify the authorship of its star. No small matter, too, that the film manifests as a life/art ouroboros concerning Beatty’s legendary propensity for romantic and sexual dalliances. But while is packed and sold as a breezy romp, screenwriter Robert Towne, who collaborated with Beatty on the script, sketches a genre framework that’s practically invisible, into which Ashby, the most mysterious of that decade’s vaunted new auteurs, is deployed to practice his peculiar wizardry. Ever the slippery one, Ashby made his art in gaps, miscommunications, elisions between scenes, scattering story crumbs to be gathered later, in transit. Ashby, an experienced editor, had a knack for modulating tone using visual composition, but his ability to keep from overplaying his hands was superhuman. George has a temper. Beatty, Ashby, Towne and a rich cast that includes Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant and Jack Warden, give the audience footholds and crevices to grip, making an easy peak to scale, but the beating heart of the film is flux, distraction and failure to listen. It’s very funny, and sexy, so it’s all the more impressive that it can bite off – and chew – a lot of what America went through between 1968 and 1975.