Peter Bogdanovich's 1981 film They All Laughed comes out on DVD today, a worthy attempt at a modern-day screwball romance, a comedy with more charm than laughs, but a movie you could almost fall in love with, except...
This is a movie with some creepy subtext, all of it inadvertant. It stars Ben Gazzara and John Ritter as private detectives following--and falling for--women played by Audrey Hepburn and Dorothy Stratten. There's a feeling of sadness knowing that, except for Gazzara, the leads are no longer with us. Ritter's loss seems particularly sad here, a gifted farceur who should have gone on to great things, but found himself stranded forever doing mostly awful sitcoms.
But the real downer is Stratten. She's achingly lovely here, if not a particularly adept actress, but her character in the film has a husband obsessed with following her every move. In real life, Stratten had a husband so obsessed with her every move that he couldn't stand it when she left him, and he blew her brains out.
It gets worse. The man Stratten left her husband for was...Peter Bogdanovich. And in the wake of her death, he turned his attention to her (much) younger sister, grooming her to be as much like Dorothy as possible. He wrote a rambling, unreadable book about Stratten, The Killing Of The Unicorn, which probably did much to knock Bogdanovich off of Hollywood's A list.
A shame, really. Bogdanovich came to prominence at the same time as such seventies filmmaking superstars as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola and Steven Spielberg, and in some ways, he was the most talented of the bunch. He seemed to be more willing to let the story's content dictate the style, instead of trying to insert his personal obsessions into material unsuited to it. Much of his work--Targets, The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon--is great, and though he stumbled badly in the mid-seventies, he made a terrific adaptation of Paul Theroux's novel Saint Jack (also with Ben Gazzara) in 1978, and They All Laughed was supposed to be his comeback.
Too bad it didn't work. If you can put all that aside, though, it is a very enjoyable picture, with a promise of greater things that has yet to be fulfilled. Maybe someday...
