Thoughts on At Long Last Love (1975)

Contemporary critics weren’t ready for At Long Last Love (1975), I think, and entered the theater with erroneous assumptions, the same issue that tanked Hollywood Homicide (2003). They thought that writer-director Peter Bogdanovich was trying for an authentic 30s musical—and maybe so, but as Peter Sobczynski notes in his otherwise error-prone piece, it was doomed by how the studio system that kept a stable of comprehensively trained players no longer existed. Instead, it’s a modern recreation of the 30s musical that deliberately punctures holes in the atmospheric framing device—fun, witty, captivating.