Hal Ashby is quite simply one the of the most underrated filmmakers of all time -- and certainly the most of his time. Unfortunately, the relative dearth of critical and biographical writing currently available about Ashby is virtually nonexistent, despite the awards, the misty paeans from his collaborators and, most importantly, the amazing streak of films in the 1970s, a streak that rivals those of his more famous contemporaries, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman. With The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979). That he disappeared behind a string of disappointing pictures in the 1980s and died before redeeming his reputation has led many critics of the Hollywood Film Renaissance to dismiss Ashby as a filmmaker who lacked a coherent voice or who was simply the competent beneficiary of remarkable collaborations. Sad face.
No biographer has yet made a subject of Hal Ashby, which is surprising considering the quality and influence of his films and the dramatic circumstances of his life. Soon after discovering his father's body at the age of twelve, Ashby dropped out of school and began working odd jobs; by seventeen he had already been married and divorced. The young Mormon decided in 1950 to leave the cold winters of Utah and Wyoming behind and to head off for the golden skies of California. For decades, he worked as an AD on numerous projects until he quickly garnered some fame for his skills as an editor, collaborating with Norman Jewison in films like The Cincinnati Kid and In the Heat of the Night for which he won an Oscar for Best Editing. It was Jewison who recommended his friend to direct The Landlord, a project under development at United Artists. Thus Hal Ashby came to make his first film at the age of 40.
The Landlord is an outrageous debut, a film that, almost 40 years later, still feels daring, both stylistically and politically. It deals with Elgar, a spoiled 29-year-old rich kid (Beau Bridges) who decides to buy a beat up tenement in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His plans are to kick out the poor black residents and turn the place into a big old bachelor pad, although he is soon affected by the various residents. It is clearly a film made by an editor, full of Godard-like jump cuts and abstract images. Characters talk to the screen at times and several montages are reminiscent of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. When we first meet Elgar, he is reclining on a lawn chair, sipping brandy. He looks directly into the camera and tells us: “It's just that I get the feeling that we're all – I mean everybody, black, white, yellow, Democrats, Communists, Republicans, old people, young people, whatever – we're all like a bunch of ants, see. See, the strongest drive we have as a true life force is to gain territory.” All of his preconceptions and values – racial, political, economic and otherwise – are tested, though, once his life becomes entwined with those of his tenants. The end result is an often brilliant, occasionally uneven film that (ridiculous as this might sound) resembles late Buñuel's attempt at a blaxploitation film.
His second film is a story of a twenty-year-old rich kid who learns to love life through his encounter with a woman sixty years his senior.
Harold and Maude delights in everyday transgressions: uprooting trees from manicured suburban streets and returning them to the forest; parading a yellow umbrella past the dark faces of a funeral line; flipping a bird to repressive authority figures, whether they be mothers, priests, psychiatrists, soldiers or highway patrolmen. That the film manages to do so without surrendering to the carpe diem-like sentiment that has made a respected actor of Robin Williams is testament to the fine performances of its leads, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, but also to Ashby's deft direction, which transforms Clark Higgins' dark satire into a Brothers Grimm-like fable. As with fairy tale, the moral of Harold and Maude is ultimately less important than the telling of the tale itself. The pure joy of Ashby's story-telling frees the film to transcend its often banal symbolism, creating a filmed world that, like that of Wes Anderson (perhaps Ashby's most gifted disciple), allows for the possibility of grace and childhood wonder in a fallen, cynical, adult world.
Ashby accomplishes this to best effect in the final sequence, in which he dismantles and intercuts three events: Harold and Maude's arrival at the hospital, Harold's agonizing wait for news of her death, and his high-speed drive up the California coastline. Accompanied only by Cat Stevens' song “Trouble” and by the roaring engine of Harold's Jaguar-cum-hearse, the sequence is marked by a tragic inevitability. There's no question of Maude's survival, no possibility that this dark fable will be appended with a Disney ending and yet, despite the sadness, Harold walks away in the end strumming his banjo, and the film is rescued from the nihilism of its day.
His next films would not follow this same optimism, although they kept Ashby's playfulness. Bound for Glory and Shampoo are both strong testaments to his work. In many ways, Coming Home best epitomises Hal Ashby's cinematic style, and is also his most personal film. The project was conceived by Jane Fonda with the help of screenwriter Nancy Dowd, and was originally intended for John Schlesinger.
However, the last of Ashby's signature films may top them all.
Being There is his adaptation of the Jerzy Kosinski novel. Kosinski swore that he would never allow it or any of his other work to be filmed, but after learning that a movie project was in the early stages of development, and after experiencing first-hand Peter Sellers' aggressive campaign for the lead role, the author set to work on a screenplay of his own. Ashby's final product is, by most accounts, a smashing success, both as an adaptation of a much-respected novel and as a film, judged on its own merits. The story of Chance, a simpleton gardener who stumbles into America's most powerful spheres of influence, Being There is a satiric jab at the co-opting of the nation's public discourse by television's empty images and content-free rhetoric.
Such ideas were nothing new to Ashby, who had been toying with similar themes in his own work for years. In The Last Detail, Shampoo and Coming Home, in particular, characters are unable to free themselves from the constant barrage of political speeches, commercial advertisements, and reportage that emanate from the televisions, billboards, and radios that seem to have them surrounded. When Sally asks Bob what combat was like, his response echoes the main argument of Being There: “I don't know what it's like; I only know what it is. TV shows what it's like; it sure as hell don't show what it is.”
Hal Ashby was diagnosed in early-1988 with a cancer that spread rapidly to his liver and colon and to which he succumbed, finally, on December 27. Ashby's death at 59 prevented him from witnessing the re-birth of independent cinema that energised America's filmmakers, young and old, during the early-1990s. Imagine how different our appraisals of Robert Altman's career might be had it ended with Popeye (1980), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and Secret Honor (1984) – had it ended before he made The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). Or, imagine how different our opinion of Francis Ford Coppola might be had he not retreated to his vineyards and re-emerged as an acclaimed producer of others' films – had his career ended with One from the Heart (1982), The Outsiders (1983), and Rumble Fish (1983). Hal Ashby personifies, better than any other director, Hollywood's Film Renaissance of the 1970s: its moral ambivalence and political rage, its stylistic audacity and deeply human voice, its supernova of energy that could not possibly burn so brightly for very long.
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