In short: Ishtar (1987)

A bit of a flop in its time – though not quite the commercial bomb some made it appear to be – this is the film that killed Elaine May’s career as a director, though with a lot of scripting and script doctoring still to come in her career. Some of the stories about the production suggest she’s not completely without fault there, though directors with a penis would probably have survived this film as well as the combination of lack of professionalism on set and utter brilliance she appears to have shown during production, and still gone on to better things. And really, getting any finished film out of this particular tortured production history, with actual politics and studio politics working their hardest to squash the film’s production, it is definitely quite an achievement of May’s to even have managed to get a finished film together at all.

Ishtar as it has come down to us is not as terrible as most critics of the time would want one to believe – why, the first act is even pretty great – though I don’t see as many charms as some of today’s reappraisers suggest in it either. The film is always at its best when it ignores its developing adventure comedy plot with weird racist moments (as were all adventure comedies mandated by law to include) in favour of showing the interactions of its singing songwriter (in the most gracious interpretation of the terms) duo played by Dustin Hoffmann and Warren Beatty. Both are pretty damn funny, playing somewhat against type, spouting May’s lovingly absurdist dialogue, and doing whatever it is they’re doing with Paul Williams’s very funny songs. Of course, after a couple of minutes of this, it’s always back to badly staged adventure movie tropes and flabby jokes, so these parts don’t make the movie good, exactly. What they do indeed achieve is to make this much maligned film worth watching at least once.