At Long Last Love

At Long Last Love (1975)

It's the top!

Four socialites unexpectedly clash: heiress Brooke Carter runs into gambler Johnny Spanish at the race track while playboy Michael O. Pritchard nearly runs into stage star Kitty O'Kelly with his car. Backstage at Kitty's show, it turns out she and Brooke are old friends who attended public school together. The foursome do the town, accompanied by Brooke's companion Elizabeth, who throws herself at Michael's butler and chauffeur Rodney James.

Date of release
1975-03-01
TMDB
5.1 / 10 (32)
Runtime
2h 5m
Genres
Comedy, Music, Romance
Director
Peter Bogdanovich

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Los Angeles

At Long Last Love is a 1975 American jukebox musical comedy film written, produced, and directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and featuring 18 songs with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It stars Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and Duilio Del Prete as two couples who each switch partners during a party and attempt to make each other jealous. Bogdanovich was inspired to make a musical with Porter's songs after Shepherd gave him a book of them.

Production

At Long Last Love was Bogdanovich's first musical film, as well as the first motion picture he wrote by himself. He got the idea to do a musical film of Cole Porter songs when his then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd gave him a book of songs by the composer. "His lyrics conveyed a frivolous era," said the director. "With a kind of sadness, but very subtle... Cole Porter lyrics are less sentimental than, say, Gershwin and more abrasive...

In September 1973, Bogadanovich announced the cast would be Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, Ryan O'Neal, and the director himself. Shepherd had recorded an album of Cole Porter songs paid for by Paramount called Cybill Does It... to Cole Porter. By March 1974, Bogdanovich had decided to not act, and replaced himself with Elliott Gould, who had experience in musical theatre. Gould and O'Neal dropped out.

Filming started in August 1974. Resisting the urge to shoot another film in black and white, Bogdanovich had it art-directed as "Black and White in Color". He wanted the characters to feel like they were having a conversation using "greeting cards in the form of songs" like "they didn't know what to say to each other." The movies of Ernst Lubitsch with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier such as One Hour With You, The Love Parade, The Merry…

In addition, the cast had a tough time performing the sequences due to having to perform them in one take and deal with wonky receiver systems in order to listen to the instrumentals. Bogdanovich later said he "was very arrogant" during the making of the film, "but that arrogance was bought out of a frantic insecurity. I knew it was so possible I was wrong that I became tough about insisting that I was right."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended