1987 espionage comedy, dir. Elaine May, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman:
IMDb. The two hopeless lounge
singers take the only gig they can get, in Morocco, but find
themselves mixed up in a nearby revolution…
Warren Beatty owed Elaine May a favour because she'd written Heaven
Can Wait (1978) and done uncredited rewrites for him on Reds
(1981). She proposed a Road to… homage.
But Beatty and May were both known as perfectionists, and even getting
a co-star was tricky. When they brought in Hoffman, also known as a
perfectionist, other actors and crew were even more reluctant to get
involved. Then Coca-Cola, which owned Columbia, had money in Morocco
that it couldn't repatriate, so that became the filming site, even
though there was no local support for a large-scale production.
But really the "worst film ever" publicity seems to have come from the
same place that it would for Waterworld eight years later: Hollywood
media felt Beatty was getting too big for his boots, and the
production was troubled and over budget, and those two things together
are enough to generate bad press.
All right, it didn't help that David Puttnam was brought in as head of
production after filming was complete to try to get the budget back
under control, given that he was already known not to get on with
Beatty or Hoffman and it's suggested even now that he may have
deliberately spread rumours putting the production in the worst
possible light.
So leave all that aside. It wasn't a happy production, but neither was
Some Like It Hot happy, and that film is wonderful. The real problem
for me is the characterisation: I just don't care one jot about these
people. They don't have anything distinctive about them; they're just
a bit rubbish at everything they do. Their various partners have very
sensibly abandoned them, and I wish I could too. I think that Beatty
and Hoffman are trying to rely on their charisma, but for me at least
this doesn't work; I see two fifty-year-old men whose characters are
hopeless dilettantes but who somehow still don't have a problem
keeping places to live, getting regular meals, and so on. Are they
trying to imitate the Woody Allen style, or is it accidental?
(Again I think of Some Like It Hot. Those guys were desperate. And
I could believe in their desperation.)
But off we go to desert shenanigans. And Isabelle Adjani, criminally
underused. There's a moment when each of the local factions has set
things up for our principals to walk out into the desert and die, and
I felt that that would have been a perfect ending to their story, but
they can't even manage that.
There's a scene where they're being shot at from a helicopter. In one
shot a guy is leaning out of the door aiming a wooden-stocked
bolt-action rifle, I think probably a Wetherby or something of that
ilk. Cut away to reaction shot. Cut back and he's still leaning out of
the door, but now with a black-stocked banana-clip full-auto AKS, a
gun that looks completely different. And nobody among this group of
"perfectionists" noticed, or if they did they couldn't be bothered to
fix it. (Presumably they took the shots twice with the different guns,
intending to decide later which one to use, and then mixed them up in
editing.)
Later there's a "battle gunship" [sic] which is a redressed Bell 222,
the same type of aircraft used for Airwolf. They didn't do as good a
job.
A comedy is supposed to have energy. The characterisation may suffer
to make the jokes work, but at least there are jokes. This is just limp.
Coca-Cola had bought Columbia in 1982, and sold it off to Sony as a
direct result of this.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.