'SHAMPOO'........HE'S SO VAIN........WE BET HE THINKS THIS FILM IS ABOUT HIM.......

Shampoo (1975)    When it comes to long range artistic stamina, 70's movies are all over the map......

               Some of them hold up just fine......still resonating after all these years.....

               Others come off as woefully dated, all of their once-lauded techniques, performances and storylines now seen as shopworn, tiresome and obvious.

                "Shampoo" is still a mixed up stew, falling into both categories at the same time.......wittily hip in its dialogue while dopey in its blunt attempts at satiric irony......

               We remember this movie arriving as a fully anointed cultural event.......born to be instantly celebrated and praised.......(not an easy feat, considering this was decades before social media drumbeating....)

               Who could resist this idea......notorious Hollywood Lothario Warren Beatty playing a variation of himself.......a randy Hollywood hair stylist who's a bed-hopping Casanova, exhaustively screwing his way through L.A.'s entire population of aspiring actresses and Beverly Hills matrons.

               And in case you don't pick up on the movie's sardonic view of America's moral breakdown, all of Beatty's cheeky depravities play out on the eve of Richard Nixon's election in 1968.....

               Film critics at the time fawned all over the Nixon stuff in "Shampoo", gushing on about how sneakily clever it was to  compare Tricky Dick with Warren's wandering dick........two deluded dicks at the mercy of their own moral bankruptcy.......

               Watching those scenes today, you want to close your eyes, sigh loudly and whisper under your breath "yeh...yeh....we get it already...."

              What still works well:  the characters carefully crafted by Beatty and co-screenwriter Robert Towne......Beatty's George Roundy, essentially a toddler with a hard-on, furiously racing around on a motorcycle to keep up with his sexual house calls......and all the women he placates with his tossed-off mantra "You're great....", played by Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie, Lee Grant and 19 year old Carrie Fisher.

               What still surprises us........despite cloaking itself in arch satire, it turns out "Shampoo" exhibits even more strict moral rectitude than a Fundamentalist church sermon.  George Roundy's few half-baked attempts to ascend to adulthood end in abysmal failure.......embarrassing, futile tries to secure financing to open his own hair salon, and a way-too-late Hail Mary grasp at lasting love with Christie, the woman he realizes is The One.

                For a movie that proudly struts its hipness, it sure as hell punishes Beatty's character for his commitment-free, immoral lifestyle.......(though he does barely manage to avoid an actual physical beating for his sins,  the kind given to Tony Curtis's similarly ambitious hustler in "Sweet Smell Of Success".)

               Enough of "Shampoo" still pops,snaps and crackles for BQ's 3 stars (***).....most of those stars earned for Julie Christie's riotous scene at a black-tie party celebrating Nixon's election.....

                We don't know of any other movie where you'd see Christie attempt fellatio on Warren Beatty at a dinner party while shlock-horror movie producer William Castle looks on with amusement......and that's 1970's entertainment......