unwanted child/part one

During an interview, Billy Wilder said to me, "All my movies are my children. I love them all."



Not all films are so lucky.



Case in point: "At Long Last Love," a film that was hastily dismissed by critics in 1975, ignored by the moviegoing public and seemingly abandoned by 20th Century-Fox, the studio that produced and released it.



The movie, now more than 35 years old, has never been released on home entertainment in any format whatsoever - not Beta, not VHS, not LaserDisc, not DVD, certainly not Blu-Ray. Yet Fox has found the wherewithal to release something like, say, "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure" - and other titles far worse - to home entertainment.



And until just recently, "At Long Last Love" has not been telecast or shown in retrospective houses. (Check out my postscript below.)



But perhaps most telling, in a candid moment during an interview conducted last winter by Adam Hulin (who co-programs with Matt Pennachi the fine Cinema Overdrive screening series in North Carolina), its maker Peter Bogdanovich flatly stated, "I don't love it ... because it’s too painful," thereby sealing his movie's fate.



Frankly, that's not reason enough, Peter, given that "At Long Last Love" was originally, obviously, a labor of love.



One can excuse the public, which essentially does what it's told to do, as well as Fox which, like any studio worth its salt, is interested in the bottom line and in looking good. And, well, a failed film does not look very good.



Yeah, one can excuse the public and the studio, but the critics, who seemed to be reacting more to Bogdanovich's relationship with his star, Cybill Shepherd, than to the film itself, should have known better. They came to the film with a disapproving gaze (or rather, in this particular case, a non-gaze) and it was exactly what they had hoped it would be.



As for Peter's decision to disavow his own film, I'll comment on that in a subsequent post.



Besides, this post - or, rather, series of posts - is not about Peter Bogdanovich.



It's about his lost masterwork, "At Long Last Love," the very film that compelled me to pursue this site and dedicate it to movies misunderstood, neglected, lost and forgotten.

Note in Passing: Wait! Wait a minute. Recently, after years of being dormant, ALLL has suddenly reappeared and, with it, an apparant resurgence of interest. It has been streaming on Netflix; it was screened at the Anthology Film Archive in June as part of its '70s movie musicals retrospective, and it now shows up with some regularity on the Fox Movie Channel, with more screenings scheduled for August 9 & 10 and

September 10 & 22. It's worth discovering/reevaluating. Now, read on...



Next Up- My anaylsis of the film



Comments can be posted at the end of Part Seven.