Shampoo

"Shampoo" is that rare film, a well-intentioned sex comedy. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite manage to become that even rarer feat, an effective sex comedy.

Warren Beatty is George Roundy, a hairdresser dating Jill (Goldie Hawn). He's trying to get money out of financier Lester Knapf (Jack Warden) to open his own salon. Meanwhile, he is having sex with Lester's mistress Jackie (Julie Christie), wife (Lee Grant) and daughter (Carrie Fisher, in a rather un-Leia like role). After a series of minor misadventures over the course of a day and a half, George realizes he loves Jackie. But just as he does so, Lester runs off with Jackie, presumably to marry her.

"Shampoo" is all about hypocrisy, not only sexual but also political. (The film takes place during the 1968 election and finds many opportunities to stick in some ironic Nixon quotes.) But it never manages to offer any real response to that hypocrisy. Jackie is supposed to be the most honest of these philanderers. Yet the characters are too underwritten for her decision to stay with Lester to have any meaning. Is she going for the money? Is she turning her back on a dishonest man (even if it means loving another one)? Does she really love Lester? Any of these interpretations are plausible given her words and actions. Such ambiguity might make another film feel more realistic and true, but for a rather broad comedy it just seems that the filmmakers haven't sorted it out.

Moreover, while there are a few funny moments here, the film never crackles with the wit that's needed for this subject matter. It's easy to skewer vapid, pretty Californians, but doing it well takes the kind of verve that the Coen brothers so deftly display. Beatty and Robert Towne, who co-wrote the script, just don't have that kind of cleverness in them.

Director Hal Ashby has no visual imagination whatsoever. He helmed some of the most famous films of the 1970s, including "Harold and Maude" and "The Last Detail," but he is wholly at the mercy of his script and actors, which don't come through here. The only original music, provided by Paul Simon, is a cheap knockoff of the soundtrack to "The Graduate." It's nothing more than Simon harmonizing and strumming his guitar; it could easily have been written and performed in a matter of minutes.

Beatty famously sought to make "Shampoo" for over a decade. He wanted to skewer his image as a womanizer with this film. While it may be entertaining for him, the rest of us need a bit more than a film about a playboy taken down to size.