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By Steve Daly
Steve Daly
Steve Daly
Steve Daly is a senior writer at EW, and also author of EW.com's Money Shot column

Notoriously vain, Warren Beatty would no doubt appreciate the fastidious video make-overs given to Shampoo and McCabe & Mrs. Miller for these discs. Criterion transfer supervisor Maria Groumbos gives Shampoo a visual sheen lacking in the tape; whenever Beverly Hills hairdresser Beatty offhandedly tells customers, ''You look great,'' their color-corrected radiance drives home the truth of the remark and the depth of his insincerity. Too bad the movie still feels like a washout, thanks to an unconvincing Beatty-as-martyr finale and pretensions to social satire (it's set around Election Day, 1968) that never gel.

Turn-of-the-century tale McCabe & Mrs. Miller, wherein hapless entrepreneur Beatty and steely madam Christie open a Pacific Northwest brothel only to lose it to bigger tycoons, suits the actor's decadent-innocent routine far better. Director Robert Altman brings a cold, revisionist eye to the frontier milieu, keeping colors muddy and filling his wide, letterboxed images with scheming townspeople. They're less sympathetic than the well-scrubbed scum of Shampoo, but their venality is more compelling — and so is Beatty's destruction at their hands.

Shampoo: B-; McCabe: A-


Posted Oct 11, 1991 | Published in issue #87 Oct 11, 1991 | Order Article Reprints