Word: shepherded
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...beleaguered Beame has to shepherd the city through a crisis he did not create. But the mayor has a few advantages. A homespun accountant who joined the city government in 1946, he can speak to the civil servants with rolled-up-sleeves rapport. Union members do not distrust him, as they did John Lindsay. Unlike Lindsay, who was always feuding with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Abe Beame gets along well with Governor Hugh Carey - an asset in a city that receives almost one-third of its budget from the state. In addition, the city's ambitious comptroller, Harrison Goldin...
Bogdanovich's movies (like What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon) are so smugly derivative of other, older directors that they seem virtually selfless. In his various media appearances, he comes on either as an unwired stand-up comic or an eager foil for Cybill Shepherd, his well-publicized but untalented girl friend. One has to go back to Targets, Bogdanovich's exciting first feature, to remember that he was a director of talent and promise...
...untidy summation of a career that has become lost in synthetic giddiness. There are 16 Cole Porter tunes, so many that the movie seems to be strung together from a series of song cues. What passes for plot concerns the romances of two couples-Burt Reynolds and, inevitably, Cybill Shepherd; Madeline Kahn and Duilio Del Prete -as they sing and dance through some smoggy dream of the '30s. The couples do not sing very well, though, and in dancing resemble a troop of hikers trying to extinguish a campfire...
This may have been the point-a naturalistic musical in a fairy-tale setting. But none of the cast is either energetic or winning enough to make that interpretation believable. Even the few with musical training-like Kahn or Eileen Brennan, who appears as a crony of Shepherd's-flounder badly. Bogdanovich directs with such headlong uncertainty that obviously satiric numbers (Give Me a Primitive Man) come to look more like self-parody. The sets and costumes are of such resplendent ugliness that they go beyond campiness...
There is a slim chance, however, that the movie will not be a total waste. Rumor has it that Shepherd and Reynolds became what Modern Screen Magazine refers to as a "Woosome twosome" during the filming. If this is true we may just possibly be spared any more attempts by Bogdanovich to turn his girl friend into a star. For the guarantee of no more Cybill Shepherd movies, I would be willing to sit through anything...