Warren Beatty is “great” in 1975 classic, being shown in a new 4K digital restoration at MoMA preservation series
SHAMPOO (Hal Ashby, 1975)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday November 6, 8:30, and Monday, November 9, 7:15
Series runs November 4-25
Tickets: $12, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
To use George Roundy’s favorite adjective, Shampoo, is “great.” In this ’70s classic, Warren Beatty, who cowrote the screenplay with Robert Towne, stars as George, a Beverly Hills hairdresser who gives his wealthy clients more than just a cut-and-blow-dry. The film takes place primarily on November 4, 1968, as Nixon is battling Humphrey for the presidency, and George can’t keep it in his pants, running back and forth between Felicia (Lee Grant), Jackie (Julie Christie), and Lorna (Carrie Fisher) while trying to open his own shop, with help from business tycoon Lester (Jack Warden) — Felicia’s husband, Jackie’s lover, and Lorna’s father. The clothing is magnificent, as, of course, are the hairstyles. Ashby’s biting comedy wonderfully captures the sexual awakening of the 1970s in all its glory — and in all its vapidity. Horror fans should keep an eye out for Lester’s friend Sid Roth, who is played by gimmickmeister William Castle. Ashby, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine, made only eleven narrative films and two concert documentaries in his too-brief life and career. Shampoo is screening in a new 4K digital restoration November 6 & 9 in the MoMA series “To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation,” with the first show introduced by Sony Pictures executive Grover Crisp. The series, which celebrates newly preserved and restored films, runs November 4-25 and includes a wide variety of works, from the original theatrical version of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls and William K. Howard’s Don’t Bet on Women to Otto Rippert’s silent Homunculus and the director’s cut of Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland blieche Mutter, in addition to “The Unknown Orson Welles,” including scenes from The Other Side of the Wind and The Dreamers introduced by Welles’s longtime partner, Oja Kodar, and Munich Filmmuseum director Stefan Droessler.