Plot in one sentence: A day in the life of a hairdresser juggling several women.

Extras:

• Three "bonus" trailers, for Mr. Deeds, Bugsy, and Cactus Flower

Come with us now to the land of yesteryear, when the world was afire with rebellion (or with just dropping out), when politics and art were interesting, and hippies and businessmen did battle in the streets, when young women wore micro length skirts and Hollywood matrons casually wore tight thighboots during the day, and everyone worried about their hair. It's Los Angeles in 1968, as seen from the vantage of 1974—and now 2003. It's the world of Shampoo and you'll be forgiven if it doesn't remind you of any experiences you've had.

For the uninitiated, Shampoo takes place in one 24-hour time period on a specific day, November 4th, 1968, when Richard Nixon won the presidency. The setting is Los Angeles, and the central character is George Roundy (played by the film's producer and credited co-writer Warren Beatty). George is a hairdresser and begins this important day trying to get a bank loan so he can open his own shop. He concludes it by attending a political party as a beard for a powerful and even dangerous businessman named Lester (Jack Warden), whose mistress is Jackie Shawn (Julie Christie), George's old flame. George wants Lester's money; Lester wants Jackie; Jackie is torn between George and Lester. George also wants Jill (Goldie Hawn), his current official girlfriend. A movie director named Johnny Pope (Tony Bill) wants Jill. Lester's wife Felicia (Lee Grant) wants George. Even Lester's daughter Lorna (Carrie Fisher) wants George, if only to score a point against her mother. At the end of this long day, George has slept with Lester's wife, his mistress, and even his daughter. But Lester seems to take this cuckolding trifecta well enough. After all, in the end, he still has everything, and George is left with nothing.

From the vantage of 1975, the setting of Shampoo must have seemed a couple of centuries past, but from 2003, 1968 now seems more "real" than 1975, a year when nothing particular seems to have happened. The film is a blend of high and low, like a Raymond Chandler detective story. It's set in salons where you can almost smell the fog of scented conditioner and expensive restaurants where alcohol is plentiful. The film alternates between small, dirty bungalows and spacious office suites that look out over a city owned by those high-rise dwellers. Modes of transportation are also important in Shampoo, from George's independence-declaring motorcycle, which he drives with his hairdryer tucked into his belt like a weapon, to Lester's Rolls Royce, where the background music is muttered stock reports. I suppose we are supposed to be appalled by the excess and the sexual freedom of this time and place, but, in fact, it's appealing, and certainly the staid, hypocritical Lester finds the licentiousness he encounters at a hippie party enticing, making him a curious forerunner of Libertarianism.

There's really not much of a story here in the usual sense of the word, just complications, but the script had its roots both in Wycherley's play, The Country Wife, and Beatty's desire to return to the subject of What's New, Pussycat?, which was supposedly based on his life. Yet as a portrait of some unlikable people in a certain time and place, it's an unexpectedly poignant film. We are asked to feel sorry for a guy who gets to have sex with three or four beautiful women in one day as a matter of course, and the means of eliciting our sympathy is to make him come across as a put-upon shlump, inarticulately trying to express himself but too much of a hedonist to ever read a book or know anything. Yet, surprisingly, it works. The loss of love is always going to get to you on-screen, and George watching Jackie drive out of his life is moving, regardless of what you ultimately think of him or her.

The production history of Shampoo seems to be thoroughly recounted in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, that default indispensable history of '70s Hollywood cinema (go to pages 33, 190-196, and 302-305 for starters). There, we learn that Beatty rendered credited director Hal Ashby artistically impotent, alienated his former best friend Robert Towne, and manipulated a bunch of studio executives into financing the film (though Beatty the producer seems to have taken a bath on the production).

Despite what seems to be awful behavior, for me, Beatty is the real hero of this book. Like Robert Evans, or George Lucas, he took on the powers of Hollywood with an early film (Bonnie and Clyde), seized control of the means of production, and almost single handedly changed the way we see, make, and write about movies. I sometimes think that Beatty hasn't received the recognition he deserves but then I remember that he in fact has received a producer's life achievement Oscar and another Oscar for directing Reds. Still, one gets the sense that his personal reputation interferes with appreciation of him as a filmmaker. Certainly he will deserve a massive, informed, lengthy tell-all biography some day with an index that will be well-thumbed for female names. Until then, a deluxe edition of Shampoo would have been nice.

Instead, what we get is a pro forma DVD release, with virtually nothing in the way of extras and only an acceptable transfer and soundtrack. What Shampoo needs and deserves is a special edition with an edited audio track from all surviving participants willing to talk about it, a reprint of the script, an isolated music score, an interactive locations map, and anything else they can come up with. Given the propensity of DVD distributors to re-issue the same DVD in different incarnations, maybe something like that is in the works, slated for a 2005 30th anniversary release. Until that possibility becomes a reality, we have to endure silence from Beatty and everyone else associated with Shampoo.

Fists of Fury

THE HARDER THEY FALL

• Theatrical release: May 9, 1956
  
• Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment
  
• $24.95
  
• 108 minutes
  
• Rated NR
  
• Region 1
  
• Street Date: January 21, 2003

• Single disc
  
• Black and white
  
• Spec-free full frame transfer
  
• Static, silent menu with 28-chapter scene selection
  
• Single-sided dual-layered disc (with a well-selected transition pause)
  
• Dolby Digital mono track
  
• Portuguese language track
  
• English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese subtitles
  
• Close captioned
  
• One sheet insert with chapter titles
  
• Keep case

• Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Rod Steiger, Jan Sterling, Mike Lane, Max Baer, Jersey Joe Walcott
  
• Directed by Mark Robson
  
• Credited writer: Philip Yordan, from the novel by Budd Schulberg

Plot in one sentence: Former sportswriter sells out to help promote a lousy boxer.

Extras:

• Two "bonus" trailers, for On the Waterfront and The Greatest and a short featurette (4:23) about Columbia's Bogart collection, showing color lobby cards.

Columbia Tristar has also embarked on the Bogart collection of movies the actor made after he left Warner Bros., and they include some of his more interesting films, among them Knock on Any Door, In a Lonely Place, and The Caine Mutiny. If they keep up the good work on evidence in The Harder They Fall, the series should carve a hefty and valuable swath out of the Bogart filmography in making his movies available on DVD.

The Harder They Fall is not only one of Humphrey Bogart's better films, it is also his last. Bogart died of cancer not long afterwards. He went out with a bang, because The Harder They Fall is a hard-hitting exposé movie that actually is more in the style of the old Warner Bros. social problem movies Bogart used to be in. As you watch it, you almost can't believe that it got made, the way you can't believe Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was allowed to make its dire testimony about how politics really work. The film is probably the hate object of boxing fans who know about it, but few can deny that boxers indeed suffer physical damage and that the sport is not in the hands of schoolmarms and bishops.

Bogart is Eddie Willis, a sportswriter out of a job since his paper folded (making him kind of a continuation of Ed Hutcheson in Deadline U.S.A.). He is sought out by Nick Benko (Rod Steiger), a corrupt boxing promoter. Benko wants Willis to help him promote the hell out of an Argentine fighter named Toro Moreno (Mike Lane). Toro is a giant simpleton who doesn't know that he has a glass jaw and hits like a girl. That's because Benko has careful to set him up with tomato cans who will eagerly take a dive.

Though Willis finds himself making a lot of money he is moving within circles he used to hate, and losing friends left and right as his former colleagues pay emotional debts he calls in to spur Toro's career. Finally, he sickens at the bloody spectacle before him, which he helped to create, in which Toro is set-up to be felled by an actual fighter, a violent champ named Buddy Brannon (boxer Max Baer). In the end, Willis makes some moral choices and commences to write a diatribe and exposé about the corruption and excesses of boxing.

Evoking memories both of John Huston's Fat City, for its view of the toilet end of the boxing dodge, Rocky, with its bloody climax, and Raging Bull with its hyper-realistic boxing scenes, The Harder They Fall is leaner than all of them and wears its conscience on its sleeve. Based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, who for some reason didn't want to write the screenplay [Note: Jan 11, 2006: Schulberg biographer Nick Beck {Budd Schulberg: a Bio-Bibliography," from Scarecrow, 2001} writes to explain why this was so: "Jerry Wald, then head of production at Columbia, told Budd Schulberg he could write the screenplay at his — Schulberg's — home in Bucks County, PA. But Harry Cohn, who hated both Budd and father B. P. Schulberg, told Wald: 'My writers work at my studio.' Budd refused."], the film is not only an engaging social tract (and another Schulbergian justification for snitching, like On the Waterfront), but almost noir-like in its frank exploration of a criminal underworld. Screenwriting credits instead go to Philip Yordan, a fascinating case in that he may never have written a word of his own (Bertrand Tavernier is obsessed with Yordan, and writes extensively about him in his two volume dictionary of American directors).

Also fascinating is the contrast in acting styles. Method actor Steiger is up against the king of cool in Bogart, and Steiger's tendency to over-act and use his mouth like an anvil only makes Bogart look cooler. Bogart is of the "I move well so I must be great " school of acting, in which having the crease on one's pants or the tilt of one's hat right is almost more important than sounding convincing when declaiming lines. Steiger and Bogart apparently got along well on the set despite their radically different approaches to their craft.

Looking like a cross between Raymond Burr and Donald Sutherland, Mike Lane's Toro exists to have his face turned into a Michael Myers death mask. He ends up looking like one of those pop-eared squeeze dolls. The slaughter of this simple youth in the ring is too much for Willis to bear. The final fight sequence is certain one of the bloodiest beatings to occur in the movies, topped only by Brando's thrasing in The Chase but without the usual reveling in the violence you get in American movies. This scene is more like the fight in The Field, and like it is one of the few films that truly recounts and recoils the horror of a fist fight.

Columbia seems to have done a top-notch job with The Harder They Fall. The box says the film is remastered in a high definition transfer, and indeed, the black and white film is sharp and remarkably free of dirt and scratches. For some reason the wide screen film begins with a windowboxed credit sequence before switching to the 1.85:1 widescreen format,but that anomaly aside, the film looks and sounds as good as it can.

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