Peter Bogdanovich, At Long Last Love, 1975
This is one of those films, like Elia Kazan's Last Tycoon, that people tend to avoid simply because they've heard / read somewhere they were no good. At least Kazan's movie scraped a 6.3 on IMDb - that Bogdanovich's musical currently holds a mere 4.9 certainly raised more than eyebrows here. Put it down, perhaps, to a wave of anti-Bogdo sentiment (in the industry at the time?) for casting his love interest Cybill in everything he could, but I suspect the real reason is that the witty glitz of Cole Porter just wasn't suited for paranoid Watergate-era America. Add to that a gaggle of snotty musical purists over at IMDb who take Shepherd and Reynolds to task for their singing and dancing - they wouldn't dare do that with Madeline Kahn, who is, of course, magnificent at both (could this be her best performance, I wonder?) - but it seems abundantly clear the Bogdanovich wasn't out to outdo Astaire and Kelly. The fact that he chose untrained singers and recorded everything live (that must have led to some fantastic problems on the set..) proves he was after something else altogether. And I reckon he got it: you'd have to be an übercurmudgeon not to appreciate the scene in the swimming pool, where Cybill snaps Burt's elastic noseplug into his face without skipping a beat - or the gorgeous long tracking shots accompanying "Did You Evah?" Or Kahn and Shepherd's walk through the park. I've heard enough raves about Ray Liotta's long walk through the kitchens in Goodfellas - about time Bogdo got a bit of kudos for this. Sets, costumes, cinematography, music - I'll give it a 9. Read some of the back story here https://uproxx.com/hitfix/peter-bogdano ... behind-it/
