Review of Shampoo (1975) by Jeffrey C — 02 Oct 2010

The romantic comedy Shampoo is directed by Hal Ashby and stars Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, and Lee Grant. The film takes place on election eve in 1968 in Beverly Hills.

The film starts off with George Roundy (Beatty) in bed with a woman and then has to go to the hair salon he works at because he is a hair dresser. Roundy is a very casual man in life. He has sex with basically every woman at the hair salon that he works at, and every woman outside of it that he sees. He has what I guess he would call a relationship with a girl Jill (Hawn) and also one with a mistress of a very powerful business man, Jackie Shawn (Christie), and his wife, Felicia Karpf (Grant). The whole film is basically Roundy trying to juggle his love life while trying to convince the powerful business man, Lester Karpf, to invest money in the hair salon he wants to open up.

The screenplay for this film was not very strong. The central problem of it is that the main character Roundy is not very relatable. The only person that could relate to Roundy is probably Beatty himself. I felt no connection to such shallow characters that are willing to have so many affairs. The plot itself could have never worked out in my opinion, unless they made it purely a comedy. And on that note the film was not even funny, I didn't even know where it would be that I was expected to laugh.

The direction for the film was decent, but nothing noteworthy. Like I said before I felt no connection to the characters and Ashby did nothing to help me with that. I guess he was able to get pretty decent performances out of the actors, so that was probably what he did best. None of the shots were too impressive, and there were no sort of shots that intended the film was at all a comedy. Ashby overall had a successful career as a director winning an Oscar himself and getting a few for some of the actors he worked with, but this was not his best.

The acting in this film was okay. I am not really a fan of Warren Beatty and his role in this did not make me change my opinion of him. Still I must see Bugsy which I hear is quite good. For this though he did not connect me at all to his character, I just thought he was pitiful and I couldn't care for him or for any of his problems. He did nothing to make the part funny either. Usually when someone writes and stars in the film they know exactly what they are looking for to make it just right and maybe Beatty got what he wanted out of the role, but he did not convince me that he was in anyway praise worthy. Hawn was not that good as Jill, she was basically just a dumb girl that at the end I was supposed to have an emotional attachment to but had none at all. I felt no connection to either Christie or Grant and I do not believe that Grant really deserved her Oscar. No one sucked me into this film like an actor should.

Overall I give this film a 4/10. The main problem was I just never could get into the story and support the characters. If I was forced to recommend this I would do so to people who enjoy romantic comedies.