1971 - THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, one of the best films of the 1970's

Peter Bogdanovich's follow up to Targets.  This film is about the lives of the  people in a small town, Anartene Texas. Filmed in black and white by old Hollywood veteran Robert Surtees, the film really captures the depressing feeling of watching a small town in the middle of nowhere slowly dying. The story follows mainly three characters, Sonny Crawford, Duane Jackson and the town beauty Jacy Farrow. 

 Whoever cast this film certainly made some excellent choices, Timothy Bottoms played Sonny Crawford a senior graduating from high school with absolutely no direction.  Jeff Bridges is his friend Duane Jackson a hot head.  Cybill Shepherd is Jacy Farrow the town beauty queen just about as lost as everyone else in the town. In a supporting role is Ben Johnson as "Sam the Lion."  Ellen Burnstyn plays Farrow's mother a fading beauty queen herself, frankly the film could have explored more of her story.

Bogdanovich an admirer of the old Hollywood system and the filmmakers who worked in it has absorbed their lessons and gets good performances and stages the scenes very well.

 

The film was almost immediately recognized as a classic and it set an impossibly high bar for Bogdanovich to follow and probably sent him down the road of remaking old Hollywood movies.

The film was written by Bogdanovich and the author of the novel which it was based on Larry McMurty it runs 118 minutes.

1981 - THEY ALL LAUGHED, attempt at a sophisticated romantic comedy.

One of the better efforts from Peter Bogdanovich who had a long dry spell after his early successes.  They All Laughed is about the romantic adventures and love lives of some rather inept private detectives working in New York City.  The film follows the detectives around while they try to determine if some married women may or may not be cheating on their husbands.

Although this film wants to be a rather sophisticated farce somewhat like the films  Max Ophuls directed, what this film really is about is girl watching.  Bogdanovich has loaded the film up with lots of hot women as they say.  Audrey Hepburn is one of the women being followed by Ben Gazzara, unsurprisingly Gazzara falls in love with her.  Model Patti Hanson is a cab driver, Bogdanovich has her imitating Lauren Bacall in To Have And Have Not.  Playboy model Colleen Camp is one of Gazzara's ex girlfriends.  Camp is basically the stand in for the Katherine Hepburn character from Bringing Up Baby.  Bogdanovich could never resist copying his mentor Howard Hawks.

 

John Ritter who was probably a stand in for Bogdanovich in this film is in love with Playboy model Dorothy Stratten in a thinly disguised version of the Bogdanovich/Stratten love affair which ended very tragically.

 

The film always kind of had a black cloud hanging over it.  Dorothy Stratten's death seemed to end the commercial possibilities for a decent release.  No studio would pick up the film when it was completed.  Bogdanovich spent his own money attempting to release the film on his own.  His plan failed and sent him into bankruptcy.

For all that, They All Laughed is a good romantic comedy.  The film was shot on New York locations and as I said before, if you are looking for a film with a lot of good looking women in it, this show is probably for you.

Bogdanovich wrote the screenplay along with Blaine Novak, the running time is 115 minutes.

1990 - TEXASVILLE, sequel to The Last Picture Show

A return to the citizens of Archer City which had been the location for The Last Picture Show.  Peter Bogdanovich is once again directing this sequel to probably one of his greatest critical and popular successes.  However this time a very meandering script which Bogdanovich wrote pretty much sabotages the film.

One of Bogdanovich's strengths as a director was his ability to work with actors.  He hasn't lost his touch.  The film is well cast with some of the old gang from The Last Picture Show back in their original roles.  

 

Again, the problem is they kind of drift through a near plot-less picture.  It's hard to tell exactly what is going on half the time and it involves some knowledge of the previous film to sort of understand anything that happens. Bogdanovich seems to struggle to mix the not very funny comedy with the drama.

Another commercial disappointment for a director whose career really went downhill after Paper Moon.  This film is overlong and at over 120 minutes just goes on and on, Bogdanovich wrote the screenplay for this film.

1972 - WHAT'S UP DOC, a rehash of a 30's screwball comedy.

Bogdanovich's follow up to The Last Picture Show was this slavish recreation of a 1930's screwball comedy particularly a Howard Hawks comedy.  Peter Bogdanovich was entering his boy wonder director genius period of his career.  After this film the critics and the Hollywood studios were so enamored of Bogdanovich that he was labeled the next Orson Welles.

This movie made a ton of money when it was released.  Audiences loved it.  Bogdanovich juggled a pretty good cast of character actors in the usual eccentric character parts that are a staple of this type of film.  The female lead Barbara Streisand did a pretty good job copying Katherine Hepburn from Bringing Up Baby.  Ryan O'Neal seemed very stiff and uncomfortable in the Cary Grant part.

Bogdanovich probably juggled the set pieces about as well as anyone could considering this film was a rehash without one real original idea in it.  Overall the film has a rather curious distancing effect as is Bogdanovich is observing the action from about 2 city blocks away from the action.

What's Up Doc has a big car chase at the end of the film.  Car chases were big stuff in movies in the 1970's they were always a sure fire audience favorite

94 minutes, written by Buck Henry, David Newman and Robert Benton, but it was apparently Buck Henry who came in at the last minute and rewrote and saved it.

1968 - TARGETS, still holds up very well

Targets is sort of a transitional film between old and modern horror films as well as old and modern Hollywood films in general.  Boris Karloff plays an old horror film actor (although he is really playing himself) who confronts a new kind of terror, everyday life.  Karloff is very good in this film considering he only worked for about two days, what a pro.   The disturbed Vietnam vet was played by a young actor named Tim O'Kelly who kind of disappeared after this film.  O'Kelly was in the original pilot for Hawaii Five, O but was recast at Jack Lord's insistence.

This was Peter Bogdanovich's first film and he never really directed another type of film like this.  Bogdanovich was a critic turned would be director and given the chance to make a film he used a lot of imagination and cleverness to stretch a small budget about as far as it could go.  Bogdanovich used a lot of montage techniques in this film something the European directors had embraced.  He was also a fan of old Hollywood directors and you can see the influence of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train towards the end of the film.  It all came together very well.

Bogdanovich cast himself as a low budget horror film director sort of like his mentor Roger Corman and he's the worst part of the picture.  Up against a veteran actor like Karloff he looks like a real amateur.  Unfortunately Bogdanovich is in a lot of the movie so you have to endure his ramblings about old Hollywood

Targets was Boris Karloff's last decent picture.  He did a few more crappy Mexican films but this was in many ways a summation of his interesting career.  Targets also has some pointed commentary on the gun happy culture that still engulfs this country.  An impressive achievement on a very low budget.

90 minutes, written by Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt with uncredited assistance from Samuel Fuller.

1975 - AT LONG LAST LOVE, trying to be fair to this film

Peter Bogdanovich in the 1970's attempted to revive a 1930's type of musical with At Long Last Love. This film was the second of three films along with Daisy Miller and Nickelodeon that really finished off his career.  Critics compared it to an inferior Astaire and Rogers musical, but watching this film after 35 years, it's clear he was actually imitating an early Ernest Lubitsch musical, probably one of the musicals Lubitsch did in 1930 or 1931.

Some critics today now call this film an under appreciated masterpiece.

Back in the early 1930's when musicals were being filmed,  sound recording was still being developed and understood.  It was not unusual to have the actors actually sing to a prerecorded sound track while performing.  Bogdanovich adopted this approach by having his actors perform to a prerecorded soundtrack connected to wireless radios with tiny earphones so they hear the music while they sang and danced.  While this was an interesting idea in conception, practically it robbed him of the ability to use modern sound equipment to enhance the singing of the actors.  Essentially he lost his ability to manipulate the sound in post production.

A bigger issue was his cast, with the exception of Madeline Kahn, John Hillerman and Eileen Brennan who seemed to understand where this film was going, Burt Reynolds and Cybil Shepard did serious harm to it.  Since Bogdanovich was having them perform their songs live, the film had to live or die on their performances, it died.

In the old Lubitsch musicals, Lubitsch had the advantage of using stage performers like Maurice Chavelier or Jack Buchanan, who could sing and dance.  Shepherd and Reynolds could do neither.   Reynolds has a smirk on his face, acting like the whole thing is a big joke.  Cybil Shepherd was a top model in the 1970's who turned to acting and while you can debate the relative merits of her acting ability, you can't argue that she's a very limited performer.  In At Long Last Love, she knows how to go for the closeup but for a fashion model,  she doesn't look very good in the 1930's costumes.

Bogdanovich  has to take most of the blame for this film, since he wrote, produced and directed it.  The story in these kinds of films is supposed to be non existent, but there really isn't a clever situation or witty line to keep the audience interested in.  The idea to have over a dozen Cole Porter songs was probably not so hot.  A dozen songs in a musical is a lot of songs, especially when sung by as cast that can't sing.

Gratuitous picture of Cybil

 

Bogdanovich never found the tone for the film.  He directs the cast to say their lines  in the overlapping dialog style that Howard Hawks used in his films.  Combining a Howard Hawks style with a Lubitsch style was a bad idea since these two directors were very different in their approach to film.   Bogdanovich who was a great admirer of Hawks should have realized that Hawks only directed one musical,  Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, and found out he had no feeling for this genre.  In that film Hawks let his choreographer stage and film all of the musical numbers.  

After 35 years did At Long Last Love get better?  Well Madeline Kahn's better than I remembered and maybe a couple of the numbers aren't really bad but for the most part, no. 

At Long Last Love is available on You Tube in 13 parts. Not recommended

118 "amateur hour" minutes.

1974 - DAISY MILLER and who thought people were going to see this

Copying film making shots and styles from Howard Hawks and John Ford, Peter Bogdanovich tried to create a film centered around his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd. The film turned out to be another nail in the old career coffin.

Reviewers at the time complained that Cybill Shepherd didn't have the acting chops to pull off her part, but it would have taken a pretty special actor to make something of the character of Daisy Miller. Daisy Miller is either a free spirit or a bimbo or an airhead or just plain clueless. Having Cybill Shepherd race through her lines like Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby was probably a poor idea as well. Shepherd also looks more like a cocktail waitress then a rich American heiress and at times her face actually seems a little hard when she is photographed.  As much as Bogdanovich blew it with Shepherd, the rest of the cast is quite good, particularly Barry Brown as Winterbourn who is attracted to her but to worried about his social standing to get involved with her.

But who was the intended audience for this film? The film is about a silly young girl offending the morals and manners of conservative Americans living abroad in Europe. Not exactly an action packed theme for a film. This probably wasn't the kind of stuff that packed them in at the Drive-In in 1974.

Daisy Miller could have used a few car chases to liven things up.  A predictable disaster.

92 minutes, screenplay by Frederic Raphael.

1976 - NICKELODEON, Bogdanovich's last picture show

With the flop of Nickelodeon Peter Bogdanovich finally hit bottom but the fall was pretty far. When The Last Picture Show was released the reviewers amazingly compared the film to Citizen Kane. A filmmaker with an already inflated ego, Bogdanovich went on to direct What's Up Doc and Paper Moon. Those films didn't equal the quality of The Last Picture Show but were financially successful. However big time reality was starting to set in for the Hollywood genius. Daisy Miller was a critical and financial failure and his obsession with the talentless model turned actress Cybil Shepard was already starting to bite him in the ass. 

His disastrous attempt at a Lubitsch type musical, At Long Last Love had bombed the year before. To stay in the game he needed a commercial hit. Nickelodeon, a story about the early days of Hollywood should have been perfect. Bogdanovich probably seemed like the right director for the project. He had interviewed and written extensively about the silent film pioneers. He had studied the old Hollywood directors like Raoul Walsh, Allan Dwan, John Ford and Howard Hawks. He had a pretty good understanding of what did and didn't make their pictures work. 

 

Bogdanovich assembled a strong cast which included Brian Keith, Stella Stevens, John Ritter and Burt Reynolds. Ryan and Tatum O'Neal were back from a previous commercial hit Paper Moon. It should have been a winner for him. But the curious case of the film was that while Bogdanovich had carefully followed and copied from the old directors he failed to breath any life into their characters or situations. 

The staging of the slapstick scenes while technically competent seemed cold and unfunny. Bogdanovich idolized Howard Hawks and more importantly the ability to mix slapstick and comedy situations into films as Hawks had done with Hatari. How ever he simply wasn't skillful enough to achieve this balance in this film. 

The film has a strange hollowness to it as it fails to draw the audience into its story. Nickelodeon also lacked any dramatic tension and frankly a film about the "patent wars" at the beginning of Hollywood probably wasn't a story subject that would interest the general film goer. Bogdanovich went on to direct other films but the failure of Nickelodeon finished him off as a mainstream director.

 

Written by Peter Bogdanovich and W.D. Richter, the running time is 121 minutes.