Picturing Peter Bogdanovich. Peter Tonguette
want questions? I’ll give you questions: Why was his production company in the early 1980s called Moon Pictures? Why does the lead character in Mask show a preternatural interest in and knowledge of Greek mythology? Why, in describing Audrey Hepburn in an article written in 1999, did Bogdanovich invoke the Irish goddess Brigit? Why does a wannabe songwriter in The Thing Called Love recite the poetry of Robert Graves? And what about that calendar? Why, for the better part of the 1990s, did Bogdanovich edit a calendar inspired by Graves’s The White Goddess? And why in nearly every one of his films are the women always winsome and the men a few steps behind? What was he getting at?
The first time we spoke, I didn’t ask every one of these questions, but I danced around them, and his closing comment to me—“You seem to know the answers to some of this stuff”—confirmed that he was grateful for my having done so. At last, he might have been thinking, someone noticed.
The answers begin—and end—with the model and actress Dorothy Stratten.
Bogdanovich met Stratten not long after his relationship with Cybill Shepherd had reached an end. They fell in love and in time were going to get married. “Dorothy was the finest, kindest, most decent human being I’ve ever known,” he said. “She made me change for the better.”48 She was not only one of the stars of They All Laughed—his follow-up to Saint Jack and also starring Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, and John Ritter—but its primary inspiration. Although he conceived the project before he knew her well, the love he had for her came to animate the film.
They All Laughed tracks the comings and goings of John, Charles, and Arthur (Gazzara, Ritter, and Blaine Novak, respectively), private eyes of varying experience and professionalism in the employ of the Odyssey Detective Agency in Manhattan. As the film opens, the trio has been retained to keep track of two married women suspected by their husbands of committing (or contemplating) adultery. John and Charles end up losing their hearts to the women they have been hired to track—Angela (Hepburn) and Dolores (Stratten)—which not only compromises their integrity but complicates their relationships with a bevy of other gal pals, including spunky country-western singer Christy (Colleen Camp) and carefree cabbie Sam (Patti Hansen).
The cast is ample, packed with Bogdanovich’s family, friends, and coworkers: his daughters, Antonia and Alexandra, were given roles, as was his secretary at the time (Linda MacEwen) and his assistant on the production (Sean Ferrer, Hepburn’s son with Mel Ferrer). The glistening New York locations have a lot to do with the film’s easygoing charm. The detectives weave their way through real crowds, on real sidewalks and streets, flitting in and out of such landmarks as the Plaza and Algonquin hotels, the Rizzoli Bookstore, and FAO Schwarz.
Yet it is Stratten, seemingly as beautiful inside as out, who dominates They All Laughed. In a film full of gesturing and motioning between detectives supposedly working incognito, Charles signals to Arthur early on that he is smitten with Dolores by placing his hand underneath his jacket and simulating a pulsating heartbeat. The shot of Stratten used to represent Charles’s point of view of Dolores is simply staggering: her profile nonpareil, her hair a striking sheath of white blond, and her smile reserved—the latter feature suggesting a quiet, modest countenance. It is no overstatement to say that few actresses in film history have been photographed so exquisitely—maybe Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century or Grace Kelly in Rear Window or Marilyn Monroe in her last, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give.
It would be too easy to call Stratten “ethereal” (as some writers have), but in They All Laughed she offsets her beauty with a sturdy, earthy quality, as when she trudges down the steps of her townhouse, armed with a pair of suitcases, or when she goes skating at a roller rink. In the latter scene—one of the film’s most charming sequences—Charles, ostensibly still on the case, has tracked Dolores to the rink, foolishly deciding to don skates in hot pursuit.
For most of the scene, the camera stays on Charles as he observes the lithesome, elegant Dolores skating gracefully, but at a key moment Bogdanovich shifts to Dolores’s perspective. The camera dollies back as she skates toward us, while Charles, visible behind her, skates to catch up. He starts mugging for her benefit, a silly-looking smile on his face, but before she can spot him, he tumbles to the floor—splat. Dolores exits frame, but Charles remains grounded, the ties to his skates in knots. The scene echoes the ending of Bringing Up Baby, in which Katharine Hepburn precipitates the collapse of Cary Grant’s dinosaur—what a mess a gorgeous woman can leave in her wake!—but with a difference: unlike Hepburn with Grant, Stratten has not actively contributed to Ritter’s fall. Her mere presence brings out the klutz in him.
Dorothy Stratten and John Ritter in They All Laughed. Courtesy Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store.
Throughout the film, Dolores is made to be slightly unattainable—quick to take leave or rush off, as she does after her first kiss with Charles in a stairwell across from her townhouse. (Our heart aches as she darts back home—she is so close yet so far.) It is left to Charles’s friend Christy to cut to the chase: dancing at a club with Charles, Christy sees him making eyes at Dolores, who is paired with her friend Jose (Ferrer). Much like the bandleader in At Long Last Love, Christy has the foursome “change partners”—Christy takes Jose, while she gives Charles to Dolores. The film’s spirit is monogamous, though; among the main cast, no character would think of taking another character’s girlfriend or boyfriend once who likes who has been established. Christy may be fond of Charles, and Jose may enjoy the company of Dolores, but each is willing to sacrifice so that true love—the kind that seems to exist between Charles and Dolores—might flourish.
The film contrasts the Charles–Dolores romance with that of an older detective—Gazzara’s John, who has his sights set on Hepburn’s Angela, the discontented wife of a globetrotting millionaire. Their affair is destined to end unhappily and does, but the film itself is unfailingly bright and peppy. In one appealing moment, Arthur and Sam trade slightly risqué barbs—she teases him about the trio of “chicks” who are after him, and he jokingly asks to take refuge by sleeping on her floor—but their conversation ends amiably, even respectfully.
“It’s nice to meet you, Sam,” Arthur says.
“You, too, Curly,” Sam replies.
This exchange is incidental—fleeting, even—yet it powerfully communicates the characters’ decency and civility.
By the final reel, Dolores has agreed to marry Charles, despite their barely having carried on a conversation. In a magical scene, Christy—knowing Charles and Dolores’s feelings for each other better than they do—again orchestrates their coming together. As Christy sings “I Don’t Think I Could Take You Back Again” on stage in a club, she motions Dolores from upstairs to descend to Charles’s table downstairs. When we see Stratten emerge in white at the top of a staircase, she resembles a vision from on high. Her presence seemingly summoned by Christy, Dolores walks slowly and silently, as she might in a marriage procession, to Charles’s table, and when she sits down, he gets to the point.
“Dolores?” he asks. “Will you marry me?”
“Okay,” she says. “I will.”
She adds, of course, that their marriage will have to wait until her divorce is a done deal. Here, in the film’s single most significant scene, Stratten emanates a straightforward solidity—both in her firmness in answering “yes” and in her practicality in adding the bit about her divorce.
The suddenness of Charles and Dolores’s engagement parallels Bogdanovich and Stratten’s. “I think it was clear to Dorothy that it was me asking her to marry me … because I worked for a long time to get John to say it just the way I wanted him to say it,” he said. “And Dorothy’s answer was just the way I assume she would have answered it.”49
The daughter of Dutch parents, Dorothy Ruth Stratten was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1960. She achieved notoriety because of her appearance in the pages of Playboy,