At Long Last Love (1975) 20th Century Fox/Musical-Comedy RT: 123 minutes Rated G (some off-color humor, mildly suggestive lyrics) Director: Peter Bogdanovich Screenplay: Peter Bogdanovich Music: Cole Porter Cinematography: Laszlo Kovacs Release date: March 1, 1975 (US) Cast: Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, Duilio Del Prete, Eileen Brennan, John Hillerman, Mildred Natwick, Quinn Redeker, Liam Dunn, M. Emmet Walsh, Burton Gilliam, Ned Wertimer, Basil Hoffman. Box Office: $1.5M (US)
Rating: ***
When it comes to box office flops, one simply must not ignore the flat-footed musical comedy At Long Last Love. It added literalness to the term “bomb” by nearly torpedoing the career of filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich who appeared to be on the brink of a brilliant directing career with two critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, under his belt. That is, until Fox let him make his salute to the musical films of the 1930s featuring the music of Cole Porter. Unfortunately, it didn’t come off as well as he hoped.
At Long Last Love was received so poorly by critics and audiences, Bogdanovich wrote an open letter of apology that was printed in newspapers throughout the US. Reviewers criticized the director’s decision to have his cast perform Porter’s songs live (as opposed to lip-synching). He felt it would retain the spontaneity that defined earlier musical films. That’s all well and good except for one thing. None of the leads are known for their singing and dancing abilities except for Cybill Shepherd (Bogdanovich’s then-girlfriend) who recorded an album of Porter songs the year before.
PLOT, WHAT PLOT? Where do you see a plot in At Long Last Love? Trick question, there isn’t one. It’s as slight as movies come. Set in the 30s, it centers on four members of the leisure class- wealthy playboy Michael Oliver Pritchard III (Reynolds, The Longest Yard), spoiled (and broke) heiress Brooke Carter (Shepherd, The Last Picture Show), stage star Kitty O’Kelly (Kahn, Blazing Saddles) and Latin lover-type Johnny Spanish (Del Prete, Daisy Miller), an Italian gambler who pretends to be rich. The happy group also includes Michael’s uptight butler/chauffeur Rodney (Hillerman, Chinatown) and Brooke’s companion Elizabeth (Brennan, The Sting). Michael meets Kitty when Rodney nearly runs her over with the car. Johnny meets Brooke and Elizabeth at the race track. They all end up at one of Kitty’s performances where Brooke realizes she knows Kitty from their school days. They spend the rest of the movie doing what rich people do, NOTHING! They hang out, go to fancy parties with other bored (and boring) rich people, frequently break out into song and dance, drink champagne by the case and switch romantic partners. That last tidbit is the only thing that qualifies as a plot development here.
At Long Last Love is an extreme example of a minimalist plot. It’s so insubstantial; it can’t even rightfully be called a plot. Let’s call it an idea. Whatever it is, Bogdanovich manages to stretch it out to a shade over two hours. It’s a rocky ride to say the least. Obviously, the main attraction is the musical numbers. It features 18 of Cole Porter’s songs, one of which is surprisingly NOT “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love”. He’s one of the greatest songwriters of all time; his lyrics perfectly capture a more innocent and frivolous time. His songs call for the royal treatment which they don’t get here. Instead, they get clumsy choreography, club-footed dancing and actors that can barely carry a tune. That’s one of the things I like about At Long Last Love. I actually enjoyed a few of the numbers, “Friendship” in particular. It’s a fun number with all six principals packed into Michael’s Rolls Royce singing away. I also liked “You’re the Top” (Reynolds-Kahn and Del Prete-Shepherd), “But in the Morning, No” (Hillerman-Brennan) and “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love” (Brennan, Kahn and Shepherd). The last one is belted out in the ladies’ lounge in a Lord & Taylor department store. The songs are vibrant and full of life, but some of the bigger ones- e.g. “Let’s Misbehave” (Shepherd)- are handled as throwaway numbers.
The name cast doesn’t exactly evoke the musical genre. To be fair, it was the studio’s idea to hire Reynolds after Elliott Gould dropped out of the project. He’s neither a singer nor a dancer, but he doesn’t do an awful job in At Long Last Love. Kahn, who gets to perform a ridiculous stage number (“Find Me a Primitive Man”) surrounded by dancers dressed as cavemen, has an unusual voice. She used it to better effect in Blazing Saddles as Marlene Dietrich stand-in Lily Von Shtupp. At times, Shepherd acts like she’s above the action and the material. As for Del Prete, this role did NOT make him a big star in America.
Brennan has a brash style that compensates for her lack of musical skills. If I’m being fair, she and Hillerman are the true stand-outs. Their romance, defined by Elizabeth brazenly throwing herself at the reserved Rodney, is the best part of At Long Last Love. They get off this great first exchange:
Elizabeth: “Well, what do they call you, big boy?”
Rodney: “Rodney James”
Elizabeth: “Rod.”
Rodney: “That, I’m afraid, is the diminutive.”
Elizabeth: “Well, I’ll bet you ain’t.”
I’ll give the cast credit for trying. None of them phone it in. In fact, they look like they’re having fun acting like fools in a silly, empty-headed movie musical.
One thing about At Long Last Love won’t escape ANY viewer, the art direction. It features an overabundance of black and white (mostly white). In fact, those are the only colors in the movie. Bogdanovich called it “black and white in color”. Everything, from the clothing to the furniture to the Art Deco sets, is rendered in black and white (mostly white). It’s an interesting look that gives the movie an otherworldly appearance, like time stopped in 1935. HOWEVER, it underlies the fact that At Long Last Love is more of an exercise in style than an actual movie.
The truth is At Long Last Love isn’t all that bad. No, let me rephrase that. It’s bad in all the right ways. It’s funny, but not in the way Bogdanovich intended. The hubris with which it’s made is hysterical. It goes wrong in so many ways, yet it still entertains. It’s fun to watch the actors embarrass themselves in this weightless movie. If you think their dancing is clumsy, wait until you get a load of their attempts at comedy. The apex of humor appears to be the scene of Reynolds accidentally sprinkling after shave into his eyes and blindly stumbling into Shepherd’s bedroom (in his underwear, of course). Was this even funny in the days of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers?
This is more or less how I felt about At Long Last Love when I saw it for the first time in summer ’97. I wanted to see it ever since I read about it in the Michael and Harry Medved book The Golden Turkey Awards where it won the prize for “The Worst Musical Extravaganza in Hollywood History” beating out equally deserving titles like Song of Norway, Lost Horizon and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. To be fair, it’s not a complete fiasco like Sgt. Pepper, but it still earns its rightful place among cinematic turkeys like Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar. For me, it’s a musical guilty pleasure like Can’t Stop the Music, Xanadu and Grease 2. If you groove on bad movies, you owe it to yourself to see At Long Last Love at least once in your life.
