Background
Hal Ashby was born on 2 September 1936 in Ogden, Utah, United States.
(Harold and Maude inspired the hope that Ashby might be a ...)
Harold and Maude inspired the hope that Ashby might be a genuine eccentric, instead of a cute, marketable oddball. But its dark humor never visited him again, and writer Colin Higgins seems responsible for its going as far as it did to abuse our settled ideas of taste. The love story is prettified and sanitary: there’s no real sex between Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. It slips away into another feeble endorsement of "do your own thing," the politics of the weary soul-searcher, too selfish and superficial to deal with public causes. Still, it has a few moments of bitter glee, and a verv pleasing, distant contempt for the middle class that explains its subsequent cult status: it allows establishment kids to scorn their affluence and status without risking either.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003B3NV6S/?tag=2022091-20
1970
(It was a modish, bawdy film, but without any directorial ...)
It was a modish, bawdy film, but without any directorial personality. In the end, its restrained view of the hairdresser libertine colludes with his self-pity and the sensual pathos of Warren Beattys sighing mouth.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007C86VE2/?tag=2022091-20
Hal Ashby was born on 2 September 1936 in Ogden, Utah, United States.
Ashby hitchhiked to California in his teens, and he worked on any and every job in pictures, rising to be an assistant editor on several William Wyler and George Stevens films: Friendly Persuasion, The Big Country, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. The influence of such pious liberalism should not be forgotten: despite his sixties aura, Ashby digested attitudes in the Eisenhower years when circumspect con-servatives could get away with pledging themselves to tame causes. Ashby became a full editor on The Loved One (64, Tony Richardson), and worked for Norman Jewison with whom he won an editing Oscar for In the Heat of the Night (67), another example of rightmindedness allied with old-fashioned melodramatic corn.
Jewison gave Ashby his first chance to direct: a film about a rich kid touched by the plight and authenticity of his Harlem tenants. Soft-centered, The Landlord is still an offbeat picture with unusual characters. The Last Detail is Ashby’s best film. Ashby executes a concept that is more bleak and analytical than he is used to: that living is a set of prisons. The Last Detail was as mutedly somber as Shampoo was boastfully risqué. But Shampoo was writers Towne and Warren Beatty, as the actor moved into the stage of his career that aspired to directing.
Bound for Glory was a blatant use of Depression picturesque to obscure human and social ugliness, an insipid piece of hero worship that glossed over the intransigence of Woody Guthrie while settling for the inflated pomp with which Hollvwood biopics have always guided untidy history.
Yet that was nothing compared with Coming Home, a movie that looked like a TV commercial, patronized paraplegics, Vietnam, the military, and love with its maudlin nobility and the thought that soap-opera histrionics could enclose political subject matter. It w'as Jane Fondas pet project this time, and in the process it threw away Nancy Dowd’s very tough script and asked us to believe that Fonda could represent a lowly, unaware army wife, that Bruce Dern w'as an average soldier, and that the paraplegic screw is an ultimate panacea— the sex again as obscure and profound as in Harold and Maude. (If only prostrate Jon Voight had been given a merciful job by lusty Ruth Gordon.) Coming Home was adolescent and decadent. Its most ruinous failing is the self-satisfaction that confuses a vacuous cult of emotion with intelligence and responsibility. Coming Home, more than Ashby dreamed of, is a film about selfexcuse and the isolation that learns to forget mistakes and problems.
Ashby’s work in the eighties was fitful, and suffered from his difficulties with drugs. At least Let's Spend the Night Together—a Rolling Stones concert film—shows his skill as an editor. Lookin’ to Get Out was on the shelf two years before it got a release. Eight Million Ways to Die was a thriller steeped in alcohol and drugs, as well as a project that had several helping hands. In hindsight. The Last Detail and Shampoo look like absorbing models of touch and control—and Ashby seems like a sad casualty who depended on strong collaborators.
(Harold and Maude inspired the hope that Ashby might be a ...)
1970(It was a modish, bawdy film, but without any directorial ...)