Has there ever been a more quality final product for a fashion of vanity project as this? Even then I don’t like calling it a vanity project. Lord knows Warren Beatty did not need this film to boost, enlarge or grow (my, my) his reputation as the ultimate ladies man of the 60’s and 70’s in Hollywood. 

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However one can easily see the correlations between the sex-stud George lead character of Ashby’s 1975 political and sexual subversive rom-com Shampoo and the star that played him, Beatty. At the end of the day of course this is so much more than a tale of a man who screws around... at the end of another day it can of course be seen as just that, but also there is a lot more going on. Shampoo is as much a character study of one man as it is a study of a time. Beatty was a credited writer on this project with Robert Towne, and of course was his typical always producing self when it came to notes and working with Ashby, by all accounts this seems to be one of the more acuminous relationships between Beatty and a director, I think this can be contributed down to one thing and one thing only – that miracle thing with these sorts of concept films that is often missed; everybody is on the same page. With a film that balances concepts both political, sexual, dramatic and comedic, the idea that everybody is fully knowing about the film they are making in regards to a terribly complicated tone is nigh on incredible. Let’s break it down then. Starting with Warren. Warren is on absolute top form here, funny, charismatic, sexy, dramatic, it really was the role he was born to play as hairdresser in Hollywood who achieves such frequent sexual partners due to the common (if deeply homophobic and stereotypical) view at the time that all male hair-dressers were gay. This allows him to be in places with women and avoid suspicion like no other. Of course like any farce, the multiple, multiple women he keeps sleeping with eventually beginning to cross paths, of his own fault and also through means out of his control (also of course always his fault). These women are played by some of the best actresses we ever had; Julie Christie (Beatty’s lover at the time, who disliked the role but took it for Beatty), Goldie Hawn (in a possibly throwaway part made ten times better by her typical ease on screen and overall talent), Lee Grant (who won an Oscar for the role) and Carrie Fisher (in her breakout role, who even says in a knowing way announcing herself “I’m nothing like my mother”).

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Of course there is also the other male star of our film with Jack Warren as another Ashby political figure in this 70’s oeuvre, before playing the president later in Being There. Here is as hilarious as always as a bumbling political figure struggling with his own affairs, made ten times worse by the night-time (and day-time) screwing of George, when he thinks that George may be the man to keep it all straight for him. There is the common held critical opinion that the world of politics that this film chooses as it’s background (that of the election eve of Richard Nixon in the late 60’s) is a very simple choice indeed, to highlight that people became so focussed on their own lives sexually, romantically and otherwise, that politics took a back seat. Of course with this film coming out in 1975 it makes all the Nixon stuff that bit more obvious, the vibe of the film is “look what you were doing when all this started”. Directorially from Ashby he is working in the world of mood once more, sticking around in parties and flashing between vignettes, balancing the background with the fore to balance the story being told in America with the story being told in the lives of our characters. Ashby is once again on top form, this time more so than others it seems, stepping back from his flourishes to give the writing and performances more of a free and easy feel. Free and easy man, it was the 60’s afterall and could a three word phrase describe the character of George better? Free and easy. Them’s the brakes though as much as they’re the joy and that’s how the film leaves us, with a broken man, rather than a hero of masculine sexual bravado. The film shares so much in theme and narrative as another film with a Paul Simon score, of course The Graduate. Both endings to me feel a kin with one another; stunted male realises the truth far too late, then a pop song plays underlying the fundamental emotional truth of the whole matter.

- Thomas Carruthers