For a good ten years after its release in 1987, Ishtar, the famously ill-fated Warren Beatty/Elaine May/Dustin Hoffman thrilla in the desert, was a literal punchline. Virtually any public meltdown, from a bungled presidential debate to a failed spring line, could be wittily dismissed with the line “Hey, it wasn’t that bad—it wasn’t like it was Ishtar!”
But, for whatever perverse reason—for such is the perversity of human nature—it became hip in certain overly hip circles to “discover” Ishtar, a prime example being Richard Brody’s 2010 effusion for the New Yorker, To Wish Upon Ishtar, who lauded the picture as follows:
It isn’t just a movie worth rescuing for a few choice bits; it’s a thoroughgoing, beginning-to-end masterwork.
Well, far be it from me to doubt the word of someone who writes for the New Yorker, and—though it wasn’t specifically Dick’s words of praise that drove me to it—I recently rented a copy of Ishtar and can only report that it really is terrible!
If you know the story of Ishtar, you know that the film suffered from horrible pre-release publicity regarding grotesque cost overruns and delays in production that drove the cost of the film up to the then unprecedented figure of $40 million (about $107 million in today’s bucks). The story of the film’s slow-moving rendezvous with disaster is entertainingly laid out for us by Wikipedia, though I was first put on the trail by James Robert Parish’s equally entertaining study of Hollywood budget-busters, Fiasco.
According to the story, Warren Beatty felt he owed Elaine May for substantial uncredited work she had done for him on Reds and felt that, though she had first directed a film back in 1971—the critically acclaimed—generally—A New Leaf, in which she also starred—she had never gotten the kind of backing needed to show what she could really do, and he “asked” Columbia pictures to supply that backing, with himself in the lead—and, shortly, with Dustin Hoffman too, who, it seems, felt he owed May for her uncredited work on his mega-hit Tootsie.
I’m sure it smelled like a vanity project from the get-go, and, with three time and money wasting prima donnas like Beatty, May, and Hoffman all gripping the wheel,1 not to mention Warren’s main squeeze, the famous in France but not in the USA Isabelle Adjani2 cast as the female lead, a lot of people must surely have thought it was a guaranteed disaster, but, back in the day, saying “no” to Warren Beatty was not a good idea. Watching the film today, however, what strikes me is not the cost, which is invisible, but rather, why, in 1986, would anyone think making this movie was a good idea in the first place.
Because what Ishtar is is an updating/riff on those wacky old Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “road” pictures—Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), etc.—that we all loved so much when we were kids—those of us who were born before 1935, that is! (May was born in 1932). The fact that most of their potential audience had never heard of the damn films—the median age for Americans in 1985 was 31—seems to have been lost on both the suits and the talent on this one.
It's “funny”—because the “Road” pictures aren’t funny—that super geezers like May and Woody Allen have such fond memories of them. “Early” Pauline Kael—pre-fame Pauline—used to sigh over those hip, witty Hope-Crosby vehicles, but later had to rewrite herself, “explaining” that they only “seemed” fresh—I’m guessing because when her acolytes rushed out to see those Golden Age classics, they could only respond with a hearty “What the Fuck?”3
In the Hope//Crosby films, the two usually play a pair of petty hustlers. Unfortunately, May came up with exactly the opposite trope—and perhaps the ultimate show biz cliché to boot—a pair of hapless show biz wannabes—aspiring singer/song writers, to be precise—who don’t know how terrible they are!
Hope and Crosby were both skilled vaudevillians (they had actually worked together when young), and even though their act was often deliberately “corny”, their delivery was excellent. For Beatty and Hoffman, the whole gag is that they’re literally terrible—they can’t sing, have terrible stage presence, and, most of all, write terrible songs. People who can’t sing or dance trying to sing and dance, while singing stupid lyrics, are not funny. Why would Elaine May, who’d been in the “business” for 30 years, write such misconceived junk, and why wouldn’t Beatty and Hoffman refuse to appear in it? Were they terrified of hurting May’s feelings? Didn’t they care that it would be their asses on the line, that they’d be the ones up there on the screen, delivering not “so bad it’s funny” performances but rather “so bad it’s pathetic” ones?
Obviously, they didn’t. But it gets even worse. Warren and Dustin are supposed to be struggling young dreamers. But both men were pushing 50, and, sure, Beatty still has a full head of hair, dyed to a lustrous sheen, a great tan, and a tight waist, but his face is the face of a man (a handsome man) pushing 50, and Hoffman is right behind. If this script were to have any chance at all—and, really, it didn’t—the leads should have looked to be in their twenties.
And it even gets even worse than that. The songs that Beatty and Hoffman are “parodies”, more or less, of standards from the Forties (to drive the point home, we hear Frank singing “One for My Baby” on the jukebox when the boys are commiserating in a bar). Yo, Elaine! Get a calendar, girlfriend! It’s the Eighties!
And May still isn’t done. One of the (many) running gags in the “Road” pictures is that Hope, the would-be smoothie, always gets shot down by the ladies, who inevitably fall for the better looking, and better voiced, Crosby instead. May thinks it’s funny to invert the joke—it’s Dustin who gets all the action, while poor Warren can only moan that “girls just don’t like me”. But, of course, most of the audience wouldn’t even get the “joke” (such as it is), because they’d never seen the Road pictures, and were just left to wonder at the sight of young women sighing over the distinctly middle-aged Hoffman’s come-ons as though he were actually “dreamy”.
As for the “plot”, through some extremely dubious—dubious and sloppy—plot devices, the script gets the two over to the Middle East, to “play” the mythical nation of Ishtar, echoing the “exotic” locations of the original films (though mercifully screening out all—or almost all—of the racist/colonial schtick endemic to the originals),4 getting entangled in both the CIA and guerrillas, with Isabelle as a “strong” female warrior, her “character” so stereotypical she may as well be playing a bimbo for all the “depth” she can convey.
Both Beatty and Hoffman seem to sleepwalk through their roles, both pretending to be as dumb and low energy as possible, which just guarantees that they’ll be boring, and can’t even stay in character—at one point Beatty sounds distinctly like he’s Clyde Barrow, while the usually clueless Hoffman occasionally—when the script requires it—proves to be sharp and resourceful.4
May tacks on a ridiculously “happy” ending—Isabelle gets to lead a “good” revolution in Ishtar while the boys’ agent forces the CIA (somehow) to both record an album with the boys and give it extensive promotion. Of course, in real life, the album would still bomb, and the boys’ “career” would be over, but, hey, that’s in the real world!
Afterwords
Successful show folk often have a condescending affection for show folk losers—the no talent strivers who are too dumb to know how bad they are, and how hopeless their quest for success—“condescending” because it’s based largely on the comforting fact that as winners they have nothing to fear from them—they’re such losers, after all! I have reviewed two films that display such smug “affection”, The Fabulous Baker Boys for the Bright Lights Film Journal, and The Disaster Artist for my own blog.
1. All three each had the right to do a complete independent final edit of the film, the three to be somehow melded together prior to release. No way that could go wrong!
2. Adjani, born in 1955, was the leading French actress of her generation and had been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The Story of Adele H at age 20 back in 1975. One can doubt if she was a name to many Americans, but she no doubt constituted satisfyingly high-end arm candy for Beatty.
3. As the Wikipedia writeup for the series explains, the films had a lot of “inside” gags and fourth-wall breaking, a device that, to my mind, comes off 99% of the time as lazy, and is always very likely to disrupt the willing suspension of disbelief—which is, of course, the whole basis of any art, no matter how “popular”. The only “Road” picture I remember seeing was the Road to Utopia, which I watched because Robert Benchley, a once-famous comic essayist, was part of the cast. The film was set in Gold Rush era Alaska, and I have no idea why it was given the title “Road to Utopia”. Benchley was not a character in the film, appearing as a “narrator” whose job was to clear up “confusion”. I found the film a thorough mess and could only assume that Benchley was inserted in a last-minute attempt to shore up an “everything but the kitchen sink” comedy gone bad, and failed to do so, badly. But Wikipedia tells me the film was a huge success.
4. In one absurd bit, the guys wow a distinctively “colonial" crowd, who look like they might have been regulars at Rick's Café Américain, with a medley of fifties kitsch.
5. A CIA agent (Charles Grodin) manipulates the boys into becoming informants for the Company, but, later, Hoffman’s character is both able to figure out what’s going on and then to manipulate the CIA in return.
