Editor’s Note: Warren Beatty won an Oscar for directing the 1981 epic Reds, but Freeline Media critic Milan Paurich thinks a brighter spotlight should be placed on Beatty’s 1975 film Shampoo, which Milan sees as one of the “defining works” of New Hollywood. Read on!
By Milan Paurich
George Roundy believes that he’s arrived at the perfect moment in history. He’s young, handsome, talented and surrounded by a culture that seems to have finally caught up with his killer instincts. The hot-shot Beverly Hills hairdresser at the center of Hal Ashby’s Shampoo sees himself as a new kind of American male: liberated from the rigid expectations of the past and free to re-invent himself. The great irony, of course, is that George comes to this realization at precisely the moment when the world that created him is starting to vanish.
That’s what makes Shampoo one of the defining works of the New Hollywood era. Beneath its romantic comedy surface of a charming young operator juggling lovers, clients and ambitions is a far more melancholy tale: the portrait of a cultural dream reaching its moment of self-awareness. It’s a movie about freedom that gradually reveals itself as a cautionary fable about the responsibilities freedom demands.
Few films have ever captured two eras simultaneously, and with such extraordinary precision. Shampoo is a zeitgeist double-header. It recreates November 1968 — the specific historical moment in which the story unfolds — while also absorbing the atmosphere of 1974–’75, the period in which it was produced and released. The distance between those two moments is the source of its power.
The world George inhabits in 1968 is one of endless possibility. The old rules appear to be collapsing; sexual conventions are changing; authority is being questioned; and reinvention feels like a birthright. The characters move through Beverly Hills believing that personal freedom can create an entirely new way of living. George, naturally, believes he’s the perfect avatar for this new age.
Yet audiences in 1975 knew something that George didn’t; they knew the dream had become a fantasy. The movie arrived in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, and the collapse of much of the optimism and good wll associated with the ’60s. America was looking back at a decade of extraordinary cultural transformation with a mix of affection and disillusionment. The idealism wasn’t false, but it hadn’t delivered the liberation many had imagined.
Ashby, Beatty and co-screenwriter Robert Towne understood that contradiction perfectly. They didn’t make a nostalgic piece about the good old days. Instead they made a film about the moment before people realized those days were kaput.
That’s why Election Day 1968 is such a brilliant setting. Richard Nixon’s victory isn’t merely historical context, it represents the collision between two versions of America: the personal revolution George believes he embodies, and the larger political reality moving in a very different direction.
While George is trying to manage his romantic life, history is quietly (and inexorably) changing around him. He hardly even notices. That blindness is the essence of his character.
Warren Beatty was uniquely qualified to play George because the role allowed him to examine the very qualities that had made him one of Hollywood’s defining superstars. Beatty’s image represented intelligence, sensuality, independence and possibility. He was the movie star audiences wanted to believe could live outside ordinary rules. Shampoo takes that fantasy and asks what would happen if someone actually believed it.
George isn’t a villain; that’s what makes him such a fascinating creation. He’s talented, affectionate and genuinely wants to see himself as a decent person. His dream of opening his own salon is sincere, and his political opinions aren’t merely fashion accessories.
The problem is that George confuses awareness with wisdom. He believes that understanding the language of liberation means he’s mastered its meaning, but he hasn’t. George wants to be admired for being sensitive without accepting the sacrifices sensitivity requires, and craves intimacy without responsibility, freedom without consequences.
Beatty’s performance is so remarkable because he allows George to remain both appealing and infuriating. A lesser actor might have made him either a charming rogue or an arrogant narcissist. Beatty understood that George is both. That complexity is what makes the movie so uncomfortable and truthful.
One of the great humanists of ’70s cinema, Ashby was fascinated by outsiders and damaged dreamers. He also had a remarkable ability to expose people’s weaknesses without denying their humanity, and did exactly that with George. The movie laughs at him, but doesn’t hate or vilify him.
A harsher film might have turned George into a symbol of everything wrong with the ’60s. Ashby, Beatty and Towne were more perceptive. They understood that George represents both the promise and failure of that era. He isn’t a fraud, but a person who hasn’t yet figured out how to live up to his own ideals.
Beatty and Towne’s screenplay gives the movie its breathtaking emotional precision. The dialogue is funny because the characters are constantly revealing themselves without realizing it. They joke, flirt and evade, yet beneath every conversation is the question nobody bothers to ask: are these people truly happy?
The women surrounding George understand that question better than he does.
Jackie (Julie Christie) may be the film’s true emotional lodestar. Christie brings extraordinary intelligence and restraint to the role, creating a woman who sees George the most clearly. She understands his charm, but also his limitations. Jackie isn’t angry because George disappoints her, she’s sad because she isn’t surprised.
Christie delivers a master class in understatement, conveying Jackie and George’s entire history through silences, glances and tiny shifts in expression. Jackie knows that George’s greatest flaw isn’t that he doesn’t care, it’s that he assumes caring is enough.
Goldie Hawn is equally wonderful because she avoids playing Jill, another of George’s girlfriends, as a romantic victim. She brings vulnerability, humor and intelligence to a character that could have easily been reduced to kewpie doll adorableness. Jill wants to believe George because she wants to believe that love itself matters. Her
disappointment stems from discovering that desire and reality aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Belonging to a world of wealth and privilege that George both mocks and envies, Lee Grant’s Felicia adds another dimension to the movie’s acerbic social portraiture. Grant makes Felicia funny, sharp and unexpectedly sympathetic. She understands the absurdity of her Beverly Hills lifestyle while remaining trapped inside it.
In her screen debut as Felicia’s teenage daughter, a pre-Star Wars Carrie Fisher brings an appealingly insolent, self-possessed intelligence to her handful of scenes. Fisher’s presence subtly reinforces one of Shampoo’s most persistent themes: adults may think they’re running the world, but history (and the children who will inherit it) is already moving on without them.
Together, these women reveal the truth George refuses to accept. He isn’t the center of their lives, he just thinks he is.
And in his Oscar-nominated turn, Jack Warden gives Lester, George’s potential business partner, a marvelous mix of bluster, wounded pride and middle-aged sexual insecurity. Beneath the character’s prosperous, hard-driving exterior is a man dimly aware that the younger generation has already begun slipping past him. Warden makes Lester both ridiculous and oddly touching, a man whose blustery confidence is largely an act for his own benefit.
The final scene ranks among the most profoundly moving in screen history because Ashby refuses to provide easy closure. George doesn’t receive a grand punishment, or have a dramatic confrontation that neatly resolves his problems. Instead, he simply sits and watches. For the first time, George is forced to exist without distraction.
What follows is a truly inspired needle drop: the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” The song is perfect because it contains the entire gestalt of Shampoo. On the surface, it’s a joyful fantasy of a future where love will solve everything. Yet beneath the optimism is longing–the ache of wanting a happiness that never arrived. That’s exactly where George finds himself. He’s surrounded by the remains of a dream of personal liberation and effortless fulfillment, a dream that good intentions are the same as goodness. Ashby doesn’t ridicule George’s dream, he mourns it.
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” transforms the ending from simple defeat into something far more revealing. George isn’t a monster receiving punishment, he’s a flawed man who has finally glimpsed himself clearly. The tragedy is that his understanding arrives too late.
The song becomes a series of questions George is unable to answer.
Wouldn’t it be nice if charm could substitute for maturity? Wouldn’t it be nice if wanting to change was the same as changing? The answers are painful because they’re so honest. But the overarching sadness derives from understanding why people want to believe otherwise.
It’s also why Shampoo remains such a striking companion piece to Beatty’s next major work, 1978’s Heaven Can Wait. The two movies approach the same fundamental question, but from opposite directions.
Shampoo asks whether a man trapped inside his own image can ever truly understand himself, and Heaven Can Wait asks whether understanding oneself can offer redemption. George Roundy never got his second chance, but Joe Pendleton did.
Those films reveal the astonishing range of Beatty’s artistry: the skeptic who examined illusion, and the romantic who still believed transformation was possible.
That journey would ultimately lead to Reds (1981), his crowning achievement as director/star. But Shampoo remains perhaps the most revealing expression of Beatty’s concerns because it used his own star mythology against itself. It’s a movie about a man who believes he’s free only to discover that freedom without responsibility is just another kind of illusion.
Nearly fifty years later, Shampoo endures because it captures both the exhilaration of an era and the sadness of watching it disappear. It’s a comedy about liberation, a tragedy about self-deception and a beautiful elegy for a dream that was never entirely real but still worth believing in.
Wouldn’t it be nice?
Movie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of theMovie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of the Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades: at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/ Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades: at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/
