In the age of streaming, there’s a widespread belief that every movie is available, all the time, everywhere. Don’t fall for it! Some of the greatest movies ever made are nowhere to be found due to everything from music rights snafus to corporate negligence. In this column, we take a look at films currently out-of-print on physical media and unavailable on any streaming platform in an effort to draw attention to them and say to their rights holders, “Release This!”
When Peter Bogdanovich‘s musical “At Long Last Love” opened in 1975, the verdict was nearly unanimous — critics agreed that the wunderkind behind “The Last Picture Show,” “What’s Up, Doc?” and “Paper Moon” had badly stumbled in his attempt to revive the style of 1930s Ernst Lubitsch musicals like “The Love Parade” and “The Merry Widow.” Even Roger Ebert, who gave the movie one of its more sympathetic reviews, said the film didn’t succeed because the performers (among them Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd) were “not really suited to musical comedy.”
That was as kind as it got. Other critics called the movie “stillborn” (Pauline Kael), “a mess” (Gene Siskel), and “the worst musical of this or any other decade” (John Simon). 50 years later, however, “At Long Last Love” has amassed a formidable cult of erudite admirers. Richard Linklater hosted a screening of the picture at the Austin Film Society. “You Must Remember This” podcaster Karina Longworth recently professed her love for the movie when she introduced a repertory screening at the Frida. Elsewhere, “Knives Out” auteur (and Longworth’s husband) Rian Johnson counts “At Long Last Love” among his favorite musicals.
The irony is that at the very moment when “At Long Last Love” is finally finding its audience, it’s virtually impossible to see. If you don’t live near a city hosting one of the movie’s intermittent repertory screenings, and weren’t fast enough to pick up the now out-of-print Blu-ray when it came out in 2013, you’re out of luck — as of this writing, “At Long Last Love” isn’t available on physical media, and it isn’t streaming on any platform.
It’s a shame, because Linklater, Longworth, and Johnson have it right: “At Long Last Love” is a delight. A jukebox musical comprised entirely of Cole Porter songs, it’s one of Bogdanovich’s many ensemble films about the bittersweet ache of loving the wrong person — or loving the right person at the wrong time, or loving too many people at once.
In this regard, “At Long Last Love” is of a piece with Bogdanovich’s melancholy comedies like “They All Laughed,” “Texasville,” and “She’s Funny That Way,” but unlike those films, it has virtually no relationship to the real world as anyone watching would know it. It’s a dream dreamt by someone who fell asleep in front of the TV while Turner Classic Movies was playing Ernst Lubitsch and Fred Astaire musicals, a film of complete artifice — the source of its pleasure and, partly, its initial commercial and critical failure.
The concept behind “At Long Last Love” is simple, the delivery extremely complex. The film basically follows six main characters as they fall in and out of love with each other: a bored millionaire (Reynolds); his servant (John Hillerman), a spoiled heiress (Shepherd), her chaperone (Eileen Brennan); a Broadway actress (Madeline Kahn) and a suave gambler (Duilio Del Prete). Bogdanovich establishes these characters and sets them in motion, whisking them through musical numbers that mix and match the lovers in alternating romantic permutations with a mathematical precision that contrasts beautifully with the uncontrollable chaos of the emotions at stake.
Throughout the film, there’s a fascinating interplay between control and spontaneity; the musical numbers themselves, for example, are staged with astonishing choreographic dexterity, often playing out in meticulously executed long takes. Yet the songs showcased in those sublime dance numbers are sung live on set by actors whose delivery is slightly off-key and out of breath. There’s a professionalism to the staging, and the performances are as mannered as anything from classical Hollywood, yet the singing has a rough and unpolished quality that links the movie to the more contemporary idiom of Bogdanovich peers like Martin Scorsese (whose “New York, New York” would make a great double feature with “At Long Last Love”).
These kinds of tensions exist throughout the movie, just as Bogdanovich was always characterized by a tension between tradition and the New Hollywood. An unabashed admirer of the directors of Hollywood’s past whose best films absorbed those directors’ expressive techniques in their style, Bogdanovich was a transitional figure whose moral complexity and ambivalence about romance had more in common with contemporaries like Paul Mazursky and John Cassavetes than with the more sharply drawn lines of a Howard Hawks or George Cukor.
In “At Long Last Love,” the modern attitudes are so sublimated to an antiquated style that audiences at the time saw nothing in it for them; it’s even more hyper-stylized and heightened than “What’s Up, Doc?” Viewed today, it’s easy to see how 1975 audiences would have found it simply weird — especially when compared to the naturalistic films like “Jaws,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” and “Nashville” that were tapping into the zeitgeist at the time. That’s probably why it plays better today than it did when it came out — 50 years on, we don’t expect “At Long Last Love” to speak to our time, so its hermetically sealed quality doesn’t come across as lacking.
Bogdanovich largely blamed himself for the movie’s initial failure, claiming he let himself be too easily convinced to make changes that weren’t right for the picture. Nearly 40 years after he made it, the director made a shocking discovery when he came across a version of “At Long Last Love” on Netflix that contained several of the musical numbers he had regrettably cut; it turns out that someone working in post-production at Fox back in the ’70s assembled a cut that kept the excised footage, and this somehow made its way to streaming in the 2010s.
Working off this version, Bogdanovich supervised a “definitive” cut that came out on Blu-ray in 2013, and it is indeed better than the movie released in 1975 simply by virtue of including several delightful musical numbers that Bogdanovich should never have cut in the first place. Unfortunately, at the moment, there’s no way for new fans to compare the editions since neither is readily available — a crime, since either way, “At Long Last Love” is at worst an intriguing oddity, and at best (for those of us who extol its virtues) a one-of-a-kind gem from one of the last great practitioners of Hollywood’s classical style.
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