Beatty attends Warden's election night Republican dinner, which goes badly when Christie literally drinks herself under the table. The staid dinner is eventually abandoned by all concerned for a swinging hippie party at a posh mansion. Once again, Beatty succumbs to his libido, but this time with disastrous consequences.
How others will see it. Although little remembered today, Shampoo pleased critics at the time and was nominated for four Academy Awards. The user ratings at imdb.com are surprisingly middling, regardless of age or gender. The satire is laid on a bit thick, perhaps too much to be credible for many viewers. After all, Los Angeles is a big city, yet Beatty and his harem of lovers keep running into each other.
How I felt about it. Although his career took off as a film editor during the late 1960s, director Hal Ashby's big decade was the 1970s. He directed seven films that decade, and each received at least one Golden Globe nomination for acting. Most successful of all was Coming Home, which won Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, and garnered Ashby's sole Oscar nomination for Best Director. Alas, Ashby is no longer with us. His career cratered in the 1980s, and he died in 1988.
One wonders how much directing Ashby actually did in Shampoo. After all, Warren Beatty is in nearly every scene, and he also produced and co-wrote the movie. Beatty would direct his next movie, Heaven Can Wait, by then aware that directing himself would cut out the middleman, and save money as well.
Shampoo, then, is Beatty's movie, and it can be argued that he is playing a version of himself. His reputation as a ladies' man goes back to the early 1960s, and a recent book alleges he has slept with 13,000 different women, which hardly seems physically possible.
Yet as an actor, he is never an egotist, at least not in the same way that, for example, Chuck Norris is. Beatty always plays a character more stupid than his own self, someone who believes in something vague that he is unable to completely explain, much less achieve.
In Shampoo, Beatty has sex with a lot of different women, including Goldie Hawn plus Jack Warden's wife, lover, and daughter. Yet all that humping hasn't made him any less anxious. In fact, it only increases the odds that things will fall apart, that his various lovers will report to each other and reveal his lies and infidelities. At the end of the movie, Beatty doesn't have anyone, although I suppose his continued presence at the salon will provide ample opportunity for a rebound.