scene’s tension is heightened a hundredfold by the absence of extraneous sound effects or ambient noise, let alone music. And perhaps the pivotal scene in The Cat’s Meow depicts two characters playing a game of charades—silently acting out their feelings for each other.
At the same time, Bogdanovich will find almost any excuse for his characters to listen to the radio or to play a record, allowing him to gracefully fudge his “no music” rule. When watching his films, you stop counting the number of times a car whizzes by and music briefly blasts from a rolled-down window. But the music is fleeting, coming and going with the car, achieving the desired effect (a musical comment on a scene without resorting to a score) ever so quickly.
He occasionally uses the same device to nonmusical ends, as in the first shot of his expertly crafted made-for-television sequel to To Sir, with Love, which no less an authority than hard-to-please New York magazine television critic John Leonard described as “a bad idea that turned into a pretty good TV movie.”41 In the opening shot of To Sir, with Love II, a taxi-cab carrying Sidney Poitier pulls up and idles in front of the camera just long enough for us to hear a snatch of a radio broadcast: “This is Peter MacIntosh for the BBC in London. The weather forecast today ….” The words fade as Poitier’s cab drives away, but the locale of the first scene in the film has been clearly and quickly established.
Then came the flops.
Referring to the films that followed Bogdanovich’s earlier trio of triumphs, critic David Thomson once wrote, “Three-in-a-row struck back,”42 and so they did in the form of Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, and Nickelodeon. Sure, these films had their stray defenders—Daisy Miller, as noted, was admired by several important critics; At Long Last Love eventually accumulated a devoted following, including Roger Ebert and Woody Allen; and Nickelodeon did acceptable business. But what of the man who just a few years earlier had made millions laugh and cry?
Well, he was there, all right, and that was part of the problem: At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon, in particular, were the most personal projects he had yet undertaken, the former his first original screenplay since Targets and the latter his long-promised story of filmdom’s origins. They were inward-looking films, not readily accessible to the masses in the manner of their predecessors, but if some audiences yawned, that didn’t make these films any less revealing.
Set in the Manhattan of the 1930s, At Long Last Love uses the songs of Cole Porter—including “You’re the Top,” “From Alpha to Omega,” and “Find Me a Primitive Man”—to tell of the romantic dalliances of four strangers whose paths cross: an idle scion (Burt Reynolds), an heiress with a cash-flow problem (Cybill Shepherd), an Italian émigré who has come to America to make a million (Duilio Del Prete), and a brassy singer (Madeline Kahn). The film unfolds in a succession of nightclubs, country clubs, movie palaces, and palatial estates. Some of the characters are better off than others, as fortunes are made, lost, and reacquired over the course of the story, and the emphasis on the finer things in life is undeniable. The stock-market crash is treated as comic fodder, and the lower orders are represented almost exclusively by an indecorous maid (Eileen Brennan), a straight-laced butler (John Hillerman), and an acerbic doorman (M. Emmet Walsh), none of whom seems to be sweating it.
The sets and costumes—rendered in inky black-and-white by production designer Gene Allen and costume designer Bobbie Mannix, but photographed in creamy color by László Kovács—resemble a live-action version of a cartoon panel by Peter Arno of the New Yorker. For some viewers, the results were unappealing. Critic Barry Putterman, in an otherwise sympathetic account of Bogdanovich’s career in the second volume of the great auteurist survey American Directors, wrote of the film’s “extremely icy detachment”—a not uncommon view.43 Bogdanovich may have been celebrating wealth, but he did so not because he felt entitled to it, but because he hadn’t always had it. In another context, he once quoted Cary Grant about the joys of staying at a hotel with all expenses paid: “The first thing you must do,” Grant told Bogdanovich, “is kick off your shoes and let a lot of minions pick them up!” The remark, Bogdanovich wrote, spoke volumes about Grant—and, perhaps, about himself: “Only someone who had to earn this comfort through hard or intense labor would make that sort of comment.”44 Similarly, At Long Last Love conjures a world of affluence and leisure in part because its writer-director finally had a taste of such things. After years of striving, didn’t he have a right to screen out poverty and drudgery? Even the name of the film’s production company reflected Bogdanovich’s ascent: Copa de Oro (Cup of Gold), after the street in Bel Air on which his house sat.
At Long Last Love has nothing of the hurried, racing feel of Bogdanovich’s other Depression-era comedy, Paper Moon, in which the just-scraping-by characters are always on the run—an appropriate choice because, as abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning is supposed to have said, “the trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” By contrast, Michael (Reynolds), Brooke (Shepherd), Johnny (Del Prete), and Kitty (Kahn) have nothing but time, and they fill it by frequenting the racetrack, driving drunk after a night of dancing, and going shopping at Lord & Taylor. The film’s extraordinarily long takes not only capture the cast’s spirited live singing and dancing in real time but also a sense of living without pressure or deadlines. Take the scene in which Michael and Kitty sing “You’re the Top” in his high-rise apartment—following the song’s prominent use in What’s Up, Doc?, it was now something of an anthem in the films of Peter Bogdanovich: the shot begins on a close-up of champagne glasses on a tray, follows Rodney as he brings the drinks into the living room—where Michael and Kitty sit, hands entwined, on a sofa—and continues as the twosome start to move, dollying in or dollying out as the choreography permits. No cut? No hurry.
Yet Bogdanovich insists that even those who have everything are in need of something more—as Brooke says, plaintively, “What’s a million dollars without love?” Although Brooke likes Michael and Kitty likes Johnny, Michael likes Kitty and Johnny likes Brooke—a state of romantic dissatisfaction beautifully evoked in “I Loved Him (but He Didn’t Love Me),” which Brooke sings about Michael and Kitty sings about Johnny during a long walk in what is supposed to be a gorgeously green Central Park.
The song repeated most often throughout the film is indeed “You’re the Top,” but the story’s actual theme is best expressed in “Friendship.” In spite of their differences, the characters come to bravely accept their unhappiness, emerging as chums at the Old 400 dance that concludes the film. There, in a magical moment, the men find themselves dancing with their ideal mate—Michael with Kitty and Johnny with Brooke—before a bandleader commands them to “change partners!” The couples oblige, the women resigning themselves to their fate. “I think she’s more lovely now than ever I see her,” Johnny tells Kitty of Brooke, who replies with a tight-lipped “Yup.” “I think she’s more beautiful now than I’ve ever seen,” Michael tells Brooke of Kitty, who replies with an even more tight-lipped “Mm-hmm.” To improve upon a line by F. Scott Fitzgerald: And so they waltz on, borne back ceaselessly… into the penthouse.
In its own way, Nickelodeon was as show-offy as At Long Last Love: in telling of the evolution of moviemaking, the story stopped in its tracks in 1915, the year of the premiere of The Birth of a Nation—because Bogdanovich himself stopped there. “Ford, Hawks, Dwan, and these other directors have already done everything, and they were all influenced by Griffith,” he told interviewers Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin in 1968. “Unless you’re some sort of primitive talent, you have to know the history of what came before to be any good.”45
In its original conception, as Bogdanovich described it to Sherman and Rubin, the project was to be set in Hollywood “from 1909 to the present” and had at its center “a Dwan-Griffith-like figure,”46 but when he finally made Nickelodeon, he had whittled down the time period to 1910 to 1915. The film, then,
