Hal Ashby’s Shampoo is a rude awakening from the California dreaming of the Sixties This satire-cum-sex-comedy is a funny, sly rebuke to the enduring myth of free love. By Philippa Snow Almost four decades before the NBC sitcom
30 Rock coined the immortal, ineluctable term “sex idiot”, Warren Beatty – a Hollywood Casanova equally well known for three gifts, two of which happened to be acting and producing – introduced us to
Shampoo’s George Roundy. George is a hairdresser and mid-century himbo trapped in early-midlife limbo by his chronic inability to keep his hairdryer in its holster. He is 34 and gorgeous; a habitual seducer with the slim hipped swagger of a minor Rolling Stone and the unclean, dim-lit apartment of an itinerant bachelor. He is dating a young, platinum-blonde model, and somebody else’s slightly-less-blonde wife – and, in case this was not enough variety, he has another ash-blonde ex who has never quite recovered from the splendo