Great read, thanks for posting! Teck's noble devotion to the film is heartwarming, and one hopes that his documentary about it makes its way onto an eventual Blu-ray release of the film. It contains a moving interview with Ben Gazzara that reveals a key to an observation swo17 made some years back:
swo17 wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2008 4:31 am
...I feel like I've forgotten to mention another big part of this take on the film: every move Ben Gazzara makes. He always looks like he's so in control of the situation (even when being violently chased by his past spurned conquests!) and yet at the same time, he always just looks coolly miserable, even when he's slyly smiling, even when he's genuinely falling for Hepburn's character. I don't know how he pulls this off [...]
Answer: Gazzara made the film in the midst of clinical depression, the experience of which he says was even more grueling than his experience with cancer. He credits Bogdanovich's generosity and the ease of his collaboration with allowing him to make it through the shoot.
Was not aware of the TCM debut, but I did stream this on MAX last month as it's currently available to watch there in HD.
I was curious about this film after picking up the Fun City Edition's blu-ray of 'Strangers Kiss' and watching the interview with Blaine Novak where he discussed 'They All Laughed' and his friendship with Bogdanovich. Not trying to be controversial, but I enjoyed 'Strangers Kiss' much more than 'They All Laughed' - but Novak is terrific in both, too bad he didn't act more.
I’m however many years late to the chorus but I loved this film too. What Bogdanovich is able to do with space and editing alone would recommend a much less delightful film — for all the talk about De Palma’s Vertigo redux in the museum opening of Dressed to Kill, the long stretches of hypnotic tailing in the first act of the film are so much more nimble and richly realized. I liked Emak-Bakia’s write up earlier in the thread and its comparison to Rivette, with the blur between symbolic Hollywood shorthand and shaggy urban documentary being a big part of the film’s charmed wavelength. I’d also like to read an essay about how the film engages with the sexual politics of its genre traditions, since the hangover of 70s free love underpins its whole elaborate structure. Even Lubitsch at his boldest couldn’t have a lovable female character paired off unproblematically with three of his men within 72 hours!
One interesting element I haven’t seen people mention is how much the film is about entertainment. The detective as cinephile metaphor that comes from Hitchcock is obvious when you know the director, but Bogdanovich goes further, emphasizing that some people have fun by watching other people have fun while giving us a kaleidoscope of nearly every possible entertainment in this specific time and place: concerts, roller rinks, arcades, shopping, diners, and taxi rides (not to mention the rarefied pleasures of disguises, flirting, stalking, smoking joints on the sidewalk, &c). More than love, it really is a generous film about pleasure — and its limits.
One of my favourite jokes that 11 year-old me didn’t really understand at the time was watching Les Nessman interview real life actress Colleen Camp “promoting” They All Laughed at WKRP in Cincinnati, and he roasts her on air because films like Gigi aren’t made anymore.
It wasn’t until a decade later when I saw They All Laughed that I realized what a meta joke it was.
