Playing Taps

AT LONG LAST LOVE Directed and Written by PETER BOGDANOVICH

This Cole Porter coloring book, mounted with great expense and no taste, is one of those grand catastrophes that make audiences either hoot in derisive surprise or look away in embarrassment. Everyone smells blood: people in the movie industry talk disaster, and they do not mean burning office buildings or crippled airplanes; critics move the heavy artillery into place. This may be just the moment, then, if only out of simple charity, to attempt an uneasy truce with Peter Bogdanovich.

Bogdanovich's movies (like What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon) are so smugly derivative of other, older directors that they seem virtually selfless. In his various media appearances, he comes on either as an unwired stand-up comic or an eager foil for Cybill Shepherd, his well-publicized but untalented girl friend. One has to go back to Targets, Bogdanovich's exciting first feature, to remember that he was a director of talent and promise.

No evidence of that here. At Long Last Love is the untidy summation of a career that has become lost in synthetic giddiness. There are 16 Cole Porter tunes, so many that the movie seems to be strung together from a series of song cues. What passes for plot concerns the romances of two couples--Burt Reynolds and, inevitably, Cybill Shepherd; Madeline Kahn and Duilio Del Prete --as they sing and dance through some smoggy dream of the '30s. The couples do not sing very well, though, and in dancing resemble a troop of hikers trying to extinguish a campfire.

This may have been the point--a naturalistic musical in a fairy-tale setting. But none of the cast is either energetic or winning enough to make that interpretation believable. Even the few with musical training--like Kahn or Eileen Brennan, who appears as a crony of Shepherd's--flounder badly. Bogdanovich directs with such headlong uncertainty that obviously satiric numbers (Give Me a Primitive Man) come to look more like self-parody. The sets and costumes are of such resplendent ugliness that they go beyond campiness.

At Long Last Love might best be remembered as the movie that asks--or, unfortunately, sings--the question "Is it a breakdown, or merely a break?" That line from the title song might most appropriately be addressed to Bogdanovich himself. At Long Last Love cost $6 million, but might almost be worth it if the movie represented the low point of Bogdanovich's talent--the point from which he can only ascend. "Jay Cocks

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