Peter Bogdanovich (The Library of Congress)
In the early 1970s, film director Peter Bogdanovich (1939–2022) stood out among his youthful Easy Rider-era “New Hollywood” contemporaries. While other filmmakers shook up the studio system with pessimistic counterculture films, the nostalgic Bogdanovich emulated studio productions (and legendary Hollywood directors) of a bygone era. Between 1971 and 1973, Bogdanovich set box offices aflame with three smash hits: the bleakly brilliant drama The Last Picture Show (1971); the shamelessly hilarious screwball slapstick comedy What’s Up, Doc? (1972); and the bittersweet masterwork Paper Moon (1973).
This former critic and lifelong chronicler of Old Hollywood was an overnight show business success story, and the film industry and its media watchdogs never forgave him for it. Once Bogdanovich followed three successive hits with three successive commercial failures—Daisy Miller (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), and Nickelodeon (1976)—envious journalists and industry rivals went into destructive overdrive to cut the boy wonder down to size. (Bogdanovich didn’t help matters by having a private life prone to scandal and tragedy.)
While celebrating this troika of early ‘70s triumphs, film historian Max Alvarez argues against Bogdanovich’s so-called “decline” after Paper Moon. A massive filmmaking talent is still on display in the director’s adaptation of Henry James’s Daisy Miller; the misunderstood musical At Long Last Love; the gritty character study Saint Jack (1979); the quirky romance They All Laughed (1981); the adolescent tearjerker Mask (1985); the vastly neglected romantic comedy The Thing Called Love (1993); and Bogdanovich’s compelling study of 1920s Hollywood royalty, The Cat’s Meow (2000), among other films.
Through film clips and archival material featuring such stars as Boris Karloff, Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Jeff Bridges, Burt Reynolds, Audrey Hepburn, Madeline Kahn, Sidney Poitier, Michael Caine, and Ben Gazzara, Alvarez presents bountiful evidence of an ongoing stylistic and narrative skill from this outstanding late 20th-century Hollywood filmmaker.
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