At Long Last Love (1975)

At Long Last Love (1975)

A new kind of musical with 16 great songs!

At Long Last Love movie storyline. This film was Peter Bogdanovich’s homage to musical comedies of the 1930s. A millionaire named Michael Oliver Pritchard III and a singer named Kitty O’Kelly meet and fall in love. Meanwhile, an indigent woman named Brooke Carter and an Italian gambler named Johnny Spanish meet and fall in love. All four people meet each other and become friends (actually, Kitty and Brooke had been friends since high-school), and soon, Brooke’s crude, fun-loving maid Elizabeth falls in love with Michael’s valet Rodney James.

Later on, Michael and Brooke fall in love, and Kitty and Johnny decide to follow them around. In order to make Brooke and Michael jealous, they try to look like they are falling in love as well. Eventually, Michael and Johnny get into a fight but then immediately make up. Soon, Brooke and Kitty make up. The two couples pair off successfully and they live happily ever after.

At Long Last Love (1975) - Cybill Shepherd
At Long Last Love (1975) – Cybill Shepherd

At Long Last Love is a 1975 American jukebox musical comedy film written, produced, and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. 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.

Featuring 18 songs with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, Bogdanovich was inspired to make a musical with the composer’s songs after Shepherd gave him a book of his songs. All of the musical sequences were performed live by the cast, since At Long Last Love was meant by Bogdanovich to be a tribute to 1930s musical films like One Hour With You, The Love Parade, The Merry Widow and The Smiling Lieutenant that also filmed the songs in the same manner.

20th Century Fox rushed the film’s release, only allowing for two test screenings before the final version premiered at Radio City Music Hall. Despite a few decent published opinions from critics like Roger Ebert, At Long Last Love faced mostly horrendous initial reviews that mainly targeted the lead actors’ performances of the musical numbers; and very low box office returns, only making less than half of its $5.14 million budget.

The critical reception was so negative that Bogdanovich printed newspaper ads apologizing for the film. Apart from a 1981 videocassette release, At Long Last Love didn’t have an official home media release for many years, so the only available versions of the film were through bootleg TV, VHS recordings, and 16mm prints. This was until the early 2010s; Bogdanovich’s 121-minute 1979 default version of the film was issued to Netflix in 2012, and the “Definitive Director’s Version,” which was 90 seconds longer, was released on Blu-ray in 2013.

At Long Last Love (1975)

About the 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 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… Gershwin was the greater musician. But Cole was a better lyricist and I was more interested in lyrics than music.” When he heard the lyrics for “I Loved Him”, with its reversal of emotion and wry lyric, he decided to use that as the finale and “worked back from there”. The film was originally called Quadrille, and was equally weighted between the four lead characters.

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.

By March 1974 Burt Reynolds had replaced Gould. Bogdanovich says he was “talked into” using Burt Reynolds, who wanted to try a musical. “The whole joke that he’s kind of a nice fellow, good looking, not particularly good at dancing. He can’t dally with the girl. He’s rather ineffectual.” He gave the other male lead to Duilio Del Prete who had just been in Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller and who the director thought was going to be a big star.[12] In March 1974, Fox agreed to finance the film.

Filming started 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 Widow and The Smiling Lieutenant influenced Bogdanovich to have all of the song sequences be filmed live, as it would recreate the “kind of sad, funny, melancholy, silly,” and “spontaneous” vibe of the films.

However, all of the lead actors, especially Reynolds “weren’t accomplished singers or dancers,” resulting in a lot of delays and mess-ups during the shooting process. 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.”

At Long Last Love Movie Poster (1975)

At Long Last Love (1975)

Directed by: Peter Bogdanovich
Starring: Burt Reynolds. Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, Duilio Del Prete, Eileen Brennan, John Hillerman, Mildred Natwick, Quinn K. Redeker, J. Edward McKinley, John Stephenson, Peter Dane
Screenplay by: Peter Bogdanovich
Production Design by: Gene Allen
Cinematography by: Laszlo Kovacs
Film Editing by: Douglas Robertson
Costume Design by: Bobbie Mannix
Set Decoration by: Jerry Wunderlich
Art Direction by: John J. Lloyd
Music by: Cole Porter
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: March 1, 1975

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