
I decided to pull out my DVD and rewatch this one because I was impressed that at least a couple of people put it on their Top Comedy lists. I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to put it on mine. It's more of a film that makes you smile, rather than laugh, and the title is less of a premonition and more of an sarcastic act of defiance against an industry which had written Peter Bogdanovich off at this point in his career.
Out of all of the New Hollywood directors, Bogdanovich was the most studied stylist. Others, like Coppola and Altman and Woody, had their share of nostalgic indulgences into varying degrees of Old Hollywood classicisms, but Bogdanovich made this a central aesthetic. Probably the acme of his melding of the genre tropes of the 30s-40s cinema with his own flavor of sentimental charm was Paper Moon. Unfortunately, Bogdanovich followed this up with a string of increasingly saccharine, meticulously artificial, romantically inflated emulations of sepia-age infantilism. Daisy Miller was a bit stiff and pompous, but At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon were crushing castles of tinsel. Bogdanovich had crapped out.
In response, he took a brief retirement, and finally returned with Saint Jack, the kind of cynical and scarred realism that no one would have thought Bogdanovich could accomplish. It still has a sense of old-world romanticism, in defiant spite of the times, but without the genre artifice filters, and Ben Gazzara as his world-weary stand-in, trying to hold on to the Casablanca pretense as the new-world pressures close in around him. This and Laughed are films of personal revenge, Bogdanovich's most mature films made entirely on his terms.
Although both Saint Jack and They All Laughed represent Bogdanovich at his purest filmmaking, straightforward work free from the classical frills, the latter is the closest to autobiography. Gazzara again is here representing Bogdanovich's ego as old man wisdom, warm and patient and clever, while splitting off another Bogdanovich stand-in in the form of young bumbling naivete, John Ritter, tailessly chasing Bogdanovich's then-muse Dorothy Stratton. The film is probably the most uncompromising and unapologetic a film that Bogdanovich could have made, at a time when no one was paying him any attention anymore, and determined to make his most personal expression on film, in the back-drop of his hometown NYC. But even if Bogdanovich eschewed commercial considerations, he's not really capable of making an uncommercial film. His essential sentimentality and charm is soaked throughout the picture. And it's evident in the film's quiet confidence that he was having the time of his life.
Now the film is tainted with the unavoidable association with Dorothy Stratton's death at the hand of her husband's murder-suicide, a scandal (told in Star 80) that overshadows all of the good feeling in the film. And there's plenty of those who will question Stratton's acting abilities (she's fine, but for my money, I think that the likewise model/non-actress Patti Hansen outclasses everyone), but that's just petty. If I have to fault the film for anything, it would be the country music that was so in vogue among these 1980 urban cowpokes.
Last edited by Jinnistan (8/17/2022 1:33 pm)