Turn Back? The Road to Ishtar

Road to Morocco made the National Film Registry by going to the Mojave Desert in California and using rear screen projection. It didn’t need to go to a “real” casbah. What Ishtar needed was more artificiality, especially in its background shots, although it was a necessity for May to lay the foundation of her farce-parody with the celebrity of her two stars. Given that Beatty and Hoffman probably loathe the celebrity ethos, they could still have ably made fun of it, just as Crosby and Hope did.

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In the space below, I want you, the reader, to store any feelings, thoughts, the thoughts of others, and anything else you believe or know about the film Ishtar (1987).

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Let’s consider the film and a few facts:

1. Elaine May, the director, never directed again.
2. The film lost $40 million in 1987 money, if not more, becoming a standard for “box office flop,” otherwise being called the Heaven’s Gate (1980) of comedies.
3. Columbia Pictures was soon sold to Sony, replicating how Heaven’s Gate destroyed United Artists.
4. The film was called “shockingly dull” and “dimwitted” and “a lifeless, massive, lumber exercise in failed comedy,” but also “unabashed vamp for a pair of household names, and as such it works, often hilariously” and was a runner-up in Vincent Canby’s top ten films of 1987.
5. The first week of its release, it was number one at the box office.

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Some good and bad, maybe very bad, things are associated with Ishtar. Ultimately, what you find is a not-so-horrible, not unwatchable film. Not even a bad film, unless one considers a “bad film” one that is “not good.” I’m not calling it fair to middling. If you assign *stars*, how many would you dispatch? Ebert bestowed a “half-star,” which might be worse than none at all. The half-star has always symbolized for me a measure of doubt. He couldn’t bring himself to making it infamous with no stars (there’s a site that gives his zero star ratings)1 The IMDb voters, 9,776 of them, gave it an average of 4.4, which is probably equal to one star, at least. The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer gave it 40% from critical reviews and 39% from individual ratings. The consistency is pleasing.

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Would I write about a film if I thought it THAT bad? Unless I am writing about it now to bludgeon the dying camel, reminding me of the following dialogue:

Chuck Clarke: Stupid-ass camel! He’d rather sit there and die!
Lyle Rogers: You know, I kind of admire that.
Chuck Clark: Me too.

Dustin Hoffman is Clarke and Warren Beatty, Rogers. If they are called Rogers and Clarke, this must be meant to refer to the explorers, for these two do explore or, rather, drift around the Moroccan desert. Much of their repartee is humorous, just not raucously funny. What is funny, though, are the songs they are inspired to write AND sing. But it is a two-edged sword. By singing them, the effect on the audience can’t help but be grating. In the first ten minutes, I was ready to stop the film. The words, however, were funnily bad to the point of being inspired (written by May and Paul Williams). In fact, it might be time to show the song lyrics. If the film had become a popular classic, “Dangerous Business” might have entered the mind of Americans as “Sounds of Silence” in The Graduate (1967) did.

Telling the truth can be dangerous business.
Honest and popular don’t go hand in hand.
If you admit that you can play the accordion,
No one’ll hire you in a rock ‘n’ roll band.

And later:

Because life is the way we audition for God;
Let us pray that we all get the job.

But one song or outburst of the start of a song could be recited by everyone forever and ever.

“Hot Fudge Love”:

Hot fudge love
cherry ripple kisses
Lip smacking, back slapping
Perfectly delicious

I didn’t mention “Sounds of Silence” gratuitously. Clarke and Rogers aspire to be Simon and Garfunkel (imagine them as Garfunkel and Simon). It is this preposterous aspiration that fuels the film, gets it off the launch pad. And gets me to play along with it. As a comedy, I am responding to it as I had to Freebie and the Bean (1975), the almost great farcical buddy film. I find the songwriters increasingly funny but not killer funny. When they get to Ishtar and Morocco, the introduction of the terrorist, the bad sultan, and the CIA man put it on the course of being another Road to Morocco (1942). Again, not a gratuitous analogy, for several critics were reminded of the Crosby-Hope classic feature (“classic” = installed into the National Film Registry, as well as garnering two Academy Award nominations). One could say that some people approached the film with hope and embraced its potential (most people condemned Ishtar as “awful” sight unseen).

Indeed, it is on The Road to Morocco and other Road films that I want to pin the failed realization of Ishtar being a great comedy. But let’s step forward ten years to Road to Bali (1952), the fifth and next to last of the series, which I watched before going on the Road to Morocco. The formula is there: two bumbling Americans, usually entertainers, on the make with the perennial love interest, Dorothy Lamour. My expectations were low, expecting the humor to be lame and the “attitude” of the films to be obnoxious. Road to Bali, especially, was difficult to watch with its “good-natured” sexual harassment and the male fawning over well-shaped women. One example: Hope conjures a good-looking woman out of a basket as one would a cobra. When he does this at the end (after Lamour goes with Crosby), Jane Russell comes out of the basket!

The humor was better than I had reason to hope, but it should be noted that most critics have found this to be the funniest Road picture. What made it funny? First, Hope (especially) and Crosby were breaking the fourth wall. This was established way back to Road to Singapore (1940), but in Bali it comes nonstop. More than Hope-Crosby winking at the audience, there were many references to other film stars, primarily from Paramount studios (an early form of product placement!).

1. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis appear in Dorothy Lamour’s dream. Dean faces the camera, then Jerry turns around dressed as a native woman (of some sort). Bing and Bob are simultaneously dreaming about Dorothy. It is difficult to figure out the meaning of her dream. Note: Martin and Lewis made an incredible 17 films between 1950 and 1956.
2. Archive footage of Humphrey Bogart hauling the boat from The African Queen (1951), establishing the premise that our boys are in a pitiless jungle.
3. Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother, walks by as Bing comments that he promised his brother a walk-on role.
4. Jane Russell emerges from the basket. She had been in two previous Paramount movies with Bob Hope: Paleface (1948) and Son of Paleface (1952).

I don’t want to prolong the look at the Road films, except to explain that the inside-joke elements and the boilerplate plot devices solidified the film’s popularity.

5. Bing ALWAYS gets Dorothy at the end – even Jane Russell goes off with him despite being brought into the film by Bob.
6. The byplay with animals: (a) In Morocco they are being licked by an unseen camel. They each believe the other is being affectionate – and are grossed out by the attention. The episode ends with the camel spitting in Hope’s face in an unscripted move; (b) A widowed gorilla in Bali first absconds with Bob for mating purposes, until Bob escapes and the gorilla pursues and carries off Bing.
7. In line with the above “transformative” behaviors, in Bali Bing and Bob are dressed in “Balinese” wedding garb and are intentionally (by the villains) married to each other. Then they are drugged and wake up in bed together, each thinking he is lying with Dorothy. After some hand-holding, they discover their situation and act appropriately appalled.

How the audience of these films must have reveled in this. One of the posters for Road to Bali says: “It’s the Riotous ‘Road’ Reunion You’ve Been Yelling For!” “Yelling,” not waiting. We must understand how the two mid-century superstars were received and loved for us to get any grip on the potential greatness lurking in Ishtar.

This potential may not have had a chance to be tapped, partly because the actor-personalities, Beatty and Hoffman, were not loved. Buddy films happen but never evolve into a series, except the Lethal Weapons (4 films) with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. In comedy, the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor pair up comes to mind; appearing in four films, they would have been caught in comedic stride (1987) if they, and not Beatty and Hoffman, were chosen to play the leads. They were loved. Beatty and Hoffman are respected, as great actors, maybe in the realm of the greatest. This doesn’t make them loved, but one could say at this point in their careers they were immune to the roles they chose. Hoffman can do Benjamin Braddock, Ratso Rizzo, Lenny Bruce, Tootsie, “Rain Man.” If anyone was ready to take command of a comedic series of films. . . . But definitely in the role of Bob Hope. No sense trying to go against type, in the face of being paired with one of the most legendary Lotharios in Hollywood history. Road to Bali makes the nearly 50-year-old Bing a ladies’ man who, in the films, has as much trouble as a Warren Beatty with women throwing themselves at him. And there’s no comparison in looks, given Der Bingle’s open-car-door ears and hair loss!

Ishtar essentially makes Beatty the anti-ladies’s man, the insecure guy who gets a girl only by mistake. In fact, Hoffman is thrust into the role to seduce the woman. This is one of many miscalculations, many of which could have been avoided. How?

I mentioned that Elaine May never directed again. She did write, and is an excellent screenwriter. Her decision-making can be questioned – and often was in several of her previous films. Basically, Paramount took away her control of A New Leaf (1971) and essentially edited it into a film May rejected. Initially, she came up with a three-hour comedy (a senseless, reckless move), and she wasn’t trying to make It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World (1963). After she ripped the film’s new ending and moaned about her work being butchered, A New Leaf opened to good reviews and good box office. She also had been 40 days over budget. Her troubles continued to her third directorial effort, Mikey and Nicky (1976), and it was ten years before she got another, and final, shot.

What does she do? She decides to film in Morocco. Worse, she wanted to go back (!) to Morocco and reshoot scenes. Road to Morocco made the National Film Registry by going to the Mojave Desert in California and using rear screen projection. It didn’t need to go to a “real” casbah. What Ishtar needed was more artificiality, especially in its background shots, although it was a necessity for May to lay the foundation of her farce-parody with the celebrity of her two stars. Given that Beatty and Hoffman probably loathe the celebrity ethos, they could still have ably made fun of it, just as Crosby and Hope did.

The female interest of Ishtar is more problematic. Isabel Adjani is playing a terrorist trying to overthrow the Sultan of Ishtar. She comes into the role with Algerian roots. Her film resume is excellent: The Tenant (1976), The Driver (1978), Nosferatu (1979), Quartet (1981). Unfortunately, most of her films are unknown to American film audiences. She is a beautiful cipher. Her repartee with Beatty and Hoffman has no resonance. It’s not a role, or a potential movie comedy classic, she could or should appear in.

But we don’t have to dwell on Isabelle Adjani or other cast members, Charles Grodin and Jack Weston (two serviceable May film alumni), to increase our potential lamentation. Perhaps Ishtar is a film that, even made the right way, would be dismissed. For some reason, the Hollywood media universe reacts adversely to the teaming of two stars perceived as being obnoxious (in this case because of the obnoxious behavior their roles entail) and root for their failure. Somewhat like the way Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello were perceived and condemned when Hudson Hawk (1991) was being made. At least the latter film has an IMDb viewer rating that is 1.4. higher than Ishtar’s, putting it near the two stars (but not thumbs-up) judgment of critics, but giving it too high a rating for me to think about rehabilitating it! Nor does Hudson Hawk have perfectly delicious music lyrics like this:

I met her, fell
I loved her well
She walked out, hell
Oh heartbreak
I met her, wham
I met her, bam . . . .

Unfortunately, the audiences get neither wham nor bam from Ishtar, from the director and actors, which has allowed the film to slide from public consciousness.

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.