THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
FLOP HAT THE SCREEN Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love is a movie with a slow leak. The night I saw it-a Saturday night at Radio City Music Hall-people kept trickling out in twos and threes...
...In two hours of bum stumbling, Reynolds only manages to find one thing he can do better than Astaire would have-lift Madeline Kahn onto a piano...
...And what makes this marvel possible is the fact that Astaire always seems to be dancing anyway...
...Cybill Shepherd fares no better, and Bogdanovich has done her a great disservice putting her in this film because, having nothing else to do, we begin to become disenchanted with her...
...The fact that Astaire can really dance gives a certain charm to the hokey sets, incredible characters and ridiculous situations in his films...
...It's the world of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical...
...It just doesn't work that way...
...Miss Shepherd is so heavy-footed that we soon notice she is also just plain heavy...
...When he knocks a statue from its pedestal during "Fancy Free," he simply pivots to scoop it up as it falls and continues dancing with it as his partner...
...Anyone who can be caught off guard so gracefully can never be clumsy no matter what he's doing...
...In the first number in Top Hat, for example, Astaire is talking to Edward Everett Horton...
...Presumably on the theory that it would be better to let the film run awhile before it was widely reviewed, Fox sent many critics passes to see it only after it had opened...
...Several years ago Bogdanovich discovered that one of the studios owns the copyright on a bunch of Cole Porter tunes, and he has attempted to re-create the best sort of thirties musical as a showcase for those tunes...
...He is at his most poised at those moments when the rest of us would be at our most awkward...
...She, Reynolds and Miss Kahn dance their way into our hearts like one of football's triple threats...
...Though these little touches of course required more practice and skill than anything else in his routines, they are what give the routines their impromptu, delightfully spontaneous air...
...I never realized before how weak her chin is and how they wrap scarves around her neck or flounce her hair to hide this...
...Surely Bogdanovich could have guessed that he wasn't going to get good musical comedy out of a cast in which Mildred Natwick is the sylph...
...All of Bogdanovich's films except one have been recreations, but in most of them what he was trying to re-create was something that existed, at least partly, in reality...
...What he is attempting to recreate in At Long Last Love existed only in movies...
...He can't dance, he can't sing, and even with a little pencil mustache, he can't really look as if he could, either...
...This is what makes Astaire's films so marvelous-this ability to slip in and out of song, to step into a dance as easily as he would step into a cab...
...Incredible as it may seem for the director whose whole reputation is based on his regard for old movies, Bogdanovich appears not to have understood in the most fundamental way what made a musical like Top Hat, or any other Astaire-Rogers film, worth watching...
...Twentieth Century-Fox must have known it was in trouble with this film, for it held only a couple of small, unpublicized screenings before the film opened...
...A few words of conversation fall into a natural cadence, he sings his next line of dialogue acapella, and before we know it he's into "Fancy Free...
...The night I saw it-a Saturday night at Radio City Music Hall-people kept trickling out in twos and threes until, by the end, about a third of the house had left...
...The trouble is that Bogdanovich has somehow missed the point...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.BECK, JR...
...Bogdanovich is under the misapprehension that sets, characters and situations which look like an Astaire-Rogers film will somehow give us the illusion his stars can dance...
...Despite all the trappings of Top Hat, we still can't help noticing that Burt Reynolds is, to put it mildly, a lummox...
...They hadn't stomped out in a huff, but just wandered out as if they had forgotten what they had come in for- as if they thought there might be something better to look at somewhere else, in the lobby maybe...
...Since Radio City's audiences are the most patient and tolerant imaginable, if they were bored I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be...
...Moving on the balls of his feet with his arms slightly akimbo, he makes even the most casual gesture as if there were an Irving Berlin tune playing in his head...
...But Bogdanovich gets all this backwards in At Long Last Love...
...This was a mistake too, though, because, as in my case, it allows the audience to review the film for the critics...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 3
