The Films of Warren Beatty: $, Dollars, starring Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn, Directed by Richard Brooks (1971)

Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty in $, better known as Dollars, 1971.

German lobby card for Dollars. "Es geht um dollars!" translates to "It's about dollars!" Well, duh.

Warren Beatty with his trusty stopwatch in Dollars, 1971. His hair is pretty amazing in this movie.

Warren Beatty working the phones, circa 1970.

The most oddly titled movie of Warren Beatty’s career is the 1971 heist movie $, which is usually referred to as Dollars. The only title we see for the movie during the opening title sequence is a giant dollar symbol sign being moved by a crane. To alleviate confusion, most of the original posters for the film show both a dollar sign and the word Dollars. Ironically enough, the movie didn’t make many dollars at the box office when it was released in December 1971, despite being a decent movie and starring Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn.

In Dollars Beatty stars as Joe Collins, an American expert in bank security who is helping a bank in Hamburg, Germany with upgrading their security. Dollars was the third movie in a row in which the first name of Beatty’s character started with the letter J. His next movie, 1974’s The Parallax View, in which he played Joe Frady, would make it four in a row. Out of the seven movies Beatty made during the 1970’s, his character is named Joe in four of them. Anyway, back to the movie. No one knows better than Joe Collins what the flaws are in the bank’s security system. With the help of his hooker friend, the bubble-headed blonde Dawn Divine (Goldie Hawn) Collins sets out to steal money from the bank’s safety deposit boxes. But Collins only wants to steal money from people who are engaged in illicit dealings, as he knows they won’t report the theft to the police. Oddly enough, Dawn’s entire clientele is made up of men who are stealing and embezzling money. 

The heist itself is quite clever, but the disadvantage of stealing money from people engaged in illicit activities is that they are often quite ruthless and vengeful when they discover their money is gone. Which leads us to perhaps the longest chase scene in the history of the movies. The crooks chase Beatty through numerous different locations, including across a frozen lake. The chase scene is sort of clever, but it’s definitely too long. According to Peter Biskind’s biography of Beatty, the star hurt his ankle performing some of the stunts during the chase scene in the train yard. (Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Biskind, p.158) You can see Beatty limping during the chase scene at the train station. There are a ton of phone calls throughout Dollars, which must have delighted Beatty, who is famous for his long phone calls, both with his paramours and movie associates. 

Dollars is a good movie, made more enjoyable if you like the two lead actors. It was written and directed by Richard Brooks, the man behind such great movies as Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, The Professionals, and In Cold Blood. Dollars is one of the lesser entries in his formidable filmography. The beginning of the film is muddled, as characters are introduced without any explanation. It takes a long time before the story starts to make sense. Dollars is one of those movies, much like Beatty’s 1966 caper film Kaleidoscope, that’s supposed to be “fun,” but isn’t actually funny. 

It’s hard to be engaged with the characters in Dollars, as they aren’t very three-dimensional. If you want Joe Collins and Dawn Divine to get away with the robbery, it’s because you like Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty, not because of any emotions you feel about the characters. Beatty does a good job playing Joe, because he gets to play a guy who talks a lot. And Warren Beatty is really good at talking. Beatty is superb when he gets to play characters who are charmers, like John McCabe in McCabe & Mrs.Miller, or Clyde Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. Dollars is yet another movie in which Beatty plays a con man/criminal. I’m not sure if the role of Dawn Divine was written for Hawn, but it certainly seems tailored for her scatterbrained persona. Hawn does a good job with what the script gives her. If you like Goldie Hawn, she’ll make you laugh. If you don’t like Goldie Hawn, she’ll irritate the hell out of you. Dawn must be doing very well, as she has a really nice apartment for a call girl/hooker. Gert Frobe, best known for playing Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger, has a supporting role as the bank manager whom Beatty finesses, the better to unknowingly assist in Beatty’s heist.  

Beatty and Goldie Hawn have a good chemistry together, even though their acting styles are rather different. Beatty and Hawn would later star in Shampoo and Town & Country together. Hawn’s three movies with Beatty ties Julie Christie as his most frequent co-star. Hawn and Beatty have remained good friends ever since making Dollars together in 1971. Hawn described her relationship with Beatty in an interview with Beatty biographer Suzanne Finstad: “He’s a very deep person…He has become the brother that I never had, and will always be till the day I die.” (Warren Beatty: A Private Man, by Suzanne Finstad, p.402) 

If you compare Dollars to Kaleidoscope, another caper movie pairing Beatty with a dizzy blonde, you can see how much movies changed in the five years between 1966 and 1971. Dollars was rated R, and there’s a lot of nudity in it, including some full frontal shots at a strip club. That would not have happened in a Hollywood movie from 1966. With the demise of the Production Code in 1968, filmmakers were free of excessive censorship, which led to movies that dealt with more explicit subject matter. 

After Dollars finished filming in April of 1971, Beatty took a long break from making movies. His next movie was 1974’s The Parallax View. In between, Beatty immersed himself in the 1972 Presidential campaign of George McGovern, and he worked on his long-gestating script about a hairdresser, which would eventually become 1975’s Shampoo.

The Films of Warren Beatty-"Town & Country," starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, and Garry Shandling (2001)

The cast of "Town & Country": Goldie Hawn, Garry Shandling, Diane Keaton, Warren Beatty. There's a reason Garry Shandling is hiding.

Garry Shandling and Warren Beatty in "Town & Country." Yes, this movie really is as bad as this still makes it look.

Warren Beatty’s most recent film, “Town & Country,” made mostly in 1998-99 but not released until 2001, is one of his worst movies, if not his very worst. “Town & Country” is Beatty’s Woody Allen movie. Minus the funny parts. On paper, it might look like a good movie, as it reunites Beatty with two of his former co-stars, Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn. Keaton made “Reds” with Beatty, and Hawn appeared in “$” also known as “Dollars” and “Shampoo” with Beatty. Co-star Garry Shandling had also appeared with Beatty in “Love Affair.” So, you’ve got a great cast, with supporting turns from Andie MacDowell, Charlton Heston, Nastassja Kinski, and Jenna Elfman. It’s Warren Beatty in a romantic comedy, what could go wrong?

Everything went wrong. The script wasn’t finished at the time filming began, Keaton eventually had to leave to make her movie “Hanging Up,” at which point the movie still wasn’t done, even though production had been going on for about 9 months! When “Town & Country” tested poorly in April of 1999, they re-shot, but the cast couldn’t be reassembled for another 8 months. Because of all the overages and the re-shooting, the budget skyrocketed, going from a relatively modest $35-$40 million to a disastrous $90 million. For a 104-minute romantic comedy! By the time “Town & Country” was finally released in April of 2001, stories had been swirling for years about what an utter fiasco it was, and it opened to bad reviews and indifferent audiences. “Town & Country” grossed $6.7 million domestically, and added a paltry $3.6 million internationally for a grand total of $10.3 million. Against a budget of $90 million. The director, Peter Chelsom, was clearly overmatched by all his actors, especially Beatty. Chelsom never put his foot down with Beatty. So Beatty did his usual thing, the script kept getting revised, and they got way behind schedule. By all accounts, Beatty and Chelsom were like oil and water on the set. All accounts also stress how much time and money Beatty wasted on the set, by insisting that the script be re-written, and by just delaying things endlessly. Beatty knew that he would be the fall guy if anything went wrong with the movie, so why did he act the way he did on the set? Why cause problems? Why not just shut up and play your part and take the money? There’s no easy answer for that. One problem is that “Town & Country” was the first movie Beatty had acted in without also being a producer, director, or screenwriter since 1975’s “The Fortune.” Beatty was used to getting his own way and having final say on a production. You could be charitable to Beatty and say that he was just trying to make the movie as good as possible. And it could well be that Beatty really thought that everything he did was improving “Town & Country.” But Beatty also should have learned from the debacle of making and marketing “Ishtar” that once a movie has a reputation for being a stinker, and once it misses too many release dates, it usually arrives in theaters dead in the water. 

The script for “Town & Country” is pretty awful. As the movie opens, Porter Stoddard (Beatty) is cheating on his wife (Diane Keaton) with an attractive cello player, portrayed by Nastassja Kinski. The audience is never given any reason or rationale for Beatty’s cheating. We don’t see his marriage to Diane Keaton falling apart and we don’t see Kinski seducing him. So there’s no audience sympathy for his character because there’s no explanation or rationale for his actions. Any kind of sympathy or understanding the audience is supposed to have for Beatty’s character is totally lost from the very beginning of the movie. The rest of the movie is basically Beatty trying to hide his cheating from Keaton, and then running into an attractive woman, so he keeps cheating. Hawn and Shandling play a married couple who are Beatty and Keaton’s best friends. During the course of the movie, Shandling discovers that he’s gay and leaves Hawn. Hawn then sleeps with Beatty. Beatty and Shandling have a “boy’s weekend” at a cabin in Aspen, where Beatty meets and seduces Jenna Elfman, who works as a clerk in a hardware store. Beatty also sleeps with Andie MacDowell, who he meets on a plane. At the end of the movie, Beatty pleads for Keaton to take him back, which she somehow does, and at the end of the movie they are back together and it’s clear that they are working things out. Keaton’s character is kind of a cipher, as we don’t get much information about how she sees the disintegration of her marriage to Beatty. And Keaton basically sleepwalks through the part, lending it her patented Annie Hall-like whimsy, but not much else. 

“Town & Country” would have made a little more sense had the film followed Keaton’s character more. And originally it was supposed to. Mike De Luca, an executive at New Line at the time, said of the original script: “they {Beatty and Keaton} come back to each other after they have both been unfaithful. They both have affairs-there’s a balance.” (“Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America,” by Peter Biskind, p. 516.) However, after the script was re-written De Luca says, “One of the biggest changes, and probably the most damaging change, was that we rewrote the script so that Diane’s character has no affairs, and therefore the sympathy for Warren’s character goes right out the window.” (Biskind, p. 517.) Yup! 

It’s really annoying how every single woman in the movie wants to sleep with Warren Beatty. Speaking as a man, a character like Beatty’s is not very sympathetic because most of us don’t have women throwing themselves at our feet everywhere we go. And also, this is not Warren Beatty at the height of his attractiveness in the 1960’s or 1970’s. It’s 60-year-old Warren Beatty in 1998-2001. He’s still a nice-looking older man, but it’s really unrealistic that someone Jenna Elfman’s age is going to pick him up after a couple minutes of flirting with him at a hardware store. Sure, in real life 60-year-old Warren Beatty could probably find lots of women to sleep with, but he’s Warren Beatty, rich, famous and a powerful movie star. The character he’s playing in “Town & Country” isn’t Warren Beatty. “Town & Country” is a very chauvinistic movie. It’s obvious that it was written by men who don’t care a lot about getting inside the heads of the female characters in the movie; they just want to get inside their pants. 

The failure of “Town & Country” and all the negative publicity surrounding it essentially ended Warren Beatty’s film career. As Peter Biskind writes, “Even if Beatty was not to blame, once again a movie in which he was involved left a trail of wreckage in its wake, as had “Dick Tracy,” “Ishtar,” “Bugsy,” “Love Affair,” and “Bulworth.”” (Biskind, p. 542.) The movies that Biskind lists are the 5 movies that Beatty had made prior to “Town & Country,” making it 6 movies in a row that had not ended well for Beatty. Even though “Dick Tracy” was a hit, Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg had penned a memo highly critical of Beatty’s directing style, and hinting that all the profits still didn’t make up for the headaches that Beatty caused. Lynn Harris, an executive at New Line who worked closely with Beatty on “Town & Country,” had this to say about Beatty’s personality: “He is at the same time brilliant and creative and amazing, and also oddly self-destructive.” (Biskind, p. 543.) Because Beatty is never able to make up his mind and commit to anything, it’s quite possible that he will never make another movie. There have been stories over the last year that he’s very close to finally making the Howard Hughes biopic that he has talked about for decades. Beatty certainly shares some traits with Howard Hughes-when Hughes was producing movies it took him years to finally finish them. Beatty has also said that he’s interested in revisiting “Dick Tracy.” Hopefully he’ll make another great movie. Beatty’s reputation suffers when compared to his contemporary Clint Eastwood, in part because Eastwood has been so prolific over the years. It helps that Eastwood has had an amazing run of terrific movies over the last decade, which have been big box-office hits and have been showered with awards. Eastwood is also well-known in Hollywood for bringing in all of his movies on time and under budget, which is the exact opposite of the way Beatty works. It also seems that at this time in his life Beatty is very content just being a family man and raising his children. Which is fine, it’s certainly his prerogative to live his life the way he wants to. But it would be great to have one more classic Warren Beatty movie.