In praise of Hal Ashby

In 1968, Hal Ashby was a long-haired, bearded, pot-smoking film editor who had spent most of the decade in various Hollywood cutting rooms and was on the verge of giving up the biz when he won an Oscar for his work on Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night. Here’s what happened next: Jewison dropped out of the film he was supposed to make, handed responsibility to Ashby, then went off to do Fiddler on the Roof. And so, aged 40, Ashby found himself directing his first feature: The Landlord, starring Beau Bridges as Elgar Enders, a free-spirited rich kid who buys a Brooklyn brownstone to turn into a luxury house for himself – but then doesn’t. Instead, he becomes emotionally and politically embedded in the lives of the African-American tenants he’s supposed to be turfing out, much to the horror of his WASP-y family.

The Landlord tackles racism and class, gives the Establishment the middle finger, and comes wrapped up in humour, humanity and not a little eccentricity. It’s pure Hal Ashby, in other words. But you could be forgiven if you’ve never seen it. Ashby is a towering influence on a host of modern actors and filmmakers, and at least two of his films are considered cult classics, but his death aged 59 in 1988 and his mediocre output in that decade have thrown his name and much of his work into the shadows.

“Making a movie is very complicated, and it seems like kind of a miracle when it actually works out,” Wes Anderson once said. “Hal Ashby made five or six great movies in a row, and that seems to be practically unheard of.”

Anderson, director of quirky and whimsical films such as The Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs, doesn’t name the Ashby movies he has in mind. So let’s do it for him – it’s the sequence which begins with The Landlord in 1970 and runs through to Being There in 1979, which stars Peter Sellers and Shirley McLaine. In between you’ll find 1971’s Harold and Maude (often described as an “offbeat romance”: that doesn’t come close), 1973’s The Last Detail (a moustachioed Jack Nicholson in a peacoat and sailor’s hat – what’s not to like?) and Shampoo, from 1975, a sharp-eyed satire on sexual politics starring (and co-written by) Warren Beatty.

Wes Anderson has acknowledged his own debt to The Last Detail, whose basic plot structure he borrows for The Darjeeling Limited (Nicholson is one half of a two-man shore patrol taking fellow sailor Randy Quaid to prison by train). But Harold, the death-obsessed teenager who cops off with septuagenarian Maude after they discover a shared obsession with funerals, is a recognisably Andersonian character too. So is Chauncey Gardiner, Peter Sellers’ innocent abroad in Being There. Likewise, the rarefied social milieu that both Harold and Elgar inhabit will be familiar from Anderson films such as Moonrise Kingdom and The Royal Tenenbaums.

Another paid-up Hal Ashby fan is American director Amy Scott, and she has turned her passion into a documentary about the man. Simply titled Hal, it plays at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this month. Using interviews with the likes of Beau and Jeff Bridges, Judd Apatow, Jane Fonda, Lou Gossett Jr and Jewison himself – as well as archive footage of Ashby – Scott tells the story of a man Variety has described as resembling “a furtively angelic hippie biker”, and picks over the reasons for his reputational decline. Scorsese, Coppola and the other young guns of 1970s Hollywood are still venerated today, but Ashby is still waiting to be rehabilitated and to take his place in the pantheon. Maybe that journey starts in Edinburgh this June.

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Hal screens as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 23&27 June. For tickets, head to http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/2018/hal

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