She's Funny That Way or, What Happened to Peter Bogdanovitch?

She's Funny That Way is Peter Bogdanovitch's first film in seven years, his last one being a tedious documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.  She's Funny That Way is something of a sequel to They All Laughed (1981), which Bogdanovitch distributed himself and on which he lost millions.  The new film was co-written by Louise Stratten, the sister of Dorothy Stratten of They All Laughed, and Bogdanovitch's ex-wife.  She's Funny That Way was originally titled Squirrels to the Nuts, based on something Charles Boyer says in Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946).  It's too bad that Bogdanovitch does not have Lubitsch's skill at comic timing (an excerpt from Lubitsch's film is inserted at the end of Bogdanovitch's, though out-of-context it makes no sense).  The one scene in Bogdanovitch's new film that could have been funny, where a cabdriver gets out of his cab and hails another one himself, needed better camera placement and timing.

Some of us once hoped that Bogdanovitch's success with The Last Picture Show (1971) might have led to more intelligent American films directed by critics and former critics, as happened in France.  The problem with this was that Bogdanovitch was never actually a critic, he was a journalist.  As a journalist he accomplished a great deal, bringing much-needed attention to classical directors in the sixties and programming films at The New Yorker Theatre and MoMA.  He wrote books on Hawks, Ford, Lang, Dwan, Welles and published articles on everyone from Edgar Ulmer to Frank Tashlin.  But these were mostly interview articles and books, wisely letting these directors speak for themselves.  In 1969 I was at MoMA when Bogdanovitch introduced Alan Dwan at a retrospective of Dwan's films that considerably fueled my interest in classical cinema.  But when it came to making films Bogdanovitch turned out not to have a great deal to say.

I haven't seen The Last Picture Show  since it came out and it may hold up well.  Bogdanovitch's first four films were somewhat impressive, but what Targets (1968),The Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc (1972), Paper Moon (1973) all have in common is Polly Platt.  She was Bogdanovitch's wife at the time and production designer on all four films.  But once Bogdanovitch became obsessed with Cybill Shepherd his marriage broke up, Polly Platt was no longer his collaborator and Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975) were financial and artistic disasters.  Bogdanovitch has struggled ever since, not helping himself by trying to sleep with every actress he directs.