Books, Arts & Manners: Smucks

Everything is relative in this world, even criminal waste. When Michael Cimino spent $40 million on the godawful Heaven’s Gate, it caused the collapse of United Artists; when Francis Ford Coppola spent a similar sum on the somewhat better Apocalypse Now, he bankrupted his own American Zoetrope studio. Along comes Elaine May with Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty as stars (and the latter as producer, too) in a $51-million disaster called Ishtar, and though there is some finger-wagging and an acid review or two, where is the much-needed chorus of disgust?

Ishtar was meant as a takeoff on all those Crosby-Hope-Lamour Road to . . . movies, when the road had never a care or a Kerouac. But what could Miss May, the writer-director, have been thinking of? It was easy enough to spoof the Morocco of Valentino or Josef Von Sternberg. But if you invent the imaginary country of Ishtar, which by some geographical hocus-pocus becomes the buffer between the Western world and Qaddafi’s Libya, and is ruled by a corrupt emir supported by our government, it is not quite enough to have two no-talent American musicians rattling around and getting into scrapes. There has to be genuine political satire, for which, Allah knows, we have more need than ever.

JS

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John Simon

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Everything is relative in this world, even criminal waste. When Michael Cimino spent $40 million on the godawful Heaven’s Gate, it caused the collapse of United Artists; when Francis Ford Coppola spent a similar sum on the somewhat better Apocalypse Now, he bankrupted his own American Zoetrope studio. Along comes Elaine May with Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty as stars (and the latter as producer, too) in a $51-million disaster called Ishtar, and though there is some finger-wagging and an acid review or two, where is the much-needed chorus of disgust?

Ishtar was meant as a takeoff on all those Crosby-Hope-Lamour Road to . . . movies, when the road had never a care or a Kerouac. But what could Miss May, the writer-director, have been thinking of? It was easy enough to spoof the Morocco of Valentino or Josef Von Sternberg. But if you invent the imaginary country of Ishtar, which by some geographical hocus-pocus becomes the buffer between the Western world and Qaddafi’s Libya, and is ruled by a corrupt emir supported by our government, it is not quite enough to have two no-talent American musicians rattling around and getting into scrapes. There has to be genuine political satire, for which, Allah knows, we have more need than ever.