Cutting Up
by March Egerton
Be it by way of a hot shave or a skillfully administered perm, barbers and hairdressers have the power to transform us. Perhaps that’s why the barber’s chair often terrifies young children, and why as adults we can experience such deep feelings of kinship with the folks who modify our heads with sharp instruments. What’s more, barbershops and salons often serve a meaningful social function beyond the scope of judicious grooming—they’re places where folks can let down their hair in more ways than one.
While it may be a stretch to call the haircutting profession a noble one, it is at minimum an indispensable vocation. Though stylists and barbers appear often in films, they’re routinely cast in bit parts, often as brassy chicks or limp-wristed guys. From time to time, however, filmmakers have managed to make some probing examinations of the grooming life. Here now, a sampler:
Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (dir: George King, 1936) This film should be of interest to Stephen Sondheim fans: It’s the tale he spruced up and turned into a hit Broadway musical. Think of it as a tonsorial version of Little Shop of Horrors, with a nasty barber whose customers end up being recast as the filling for meat pies. With a story line like that, you can well imagine that the songs practically write themselves.
The Great Dictator (dir: Charlie Chaplin, 1940) In his first complete talkie, Chaplin proved up to the demanding task he set for himself—that of playing both a Jewish barber and a Hitler-like dictator named Adenoid Henkel. Genius that he was, he managed to strip the bark off the Nazis while at the same time infusing the barber with much of the same downtrodden sweetness he displayed in City Lights. The satire is biting—never one to appreciate a good belly laugh at his own expense, Hitler banned the film in Germany. The slapstick, meanwhile, is quite entertaining; highlights include the absentminded barber lathering and shaving a pretty washerwoman (Paulette Goddard).
Shampoo (dir: Hal Ashby, 1975) Warren Beatty is the stereotypical hairdresser in that he knows his clients better than their husbands do. The twist is that he’s straight, and he’s sleeping with so many women that he hardly has the strength or the time to pick up a pair of scissors. John F. Kennedy had nothing on this guy, whose female conquests—married, related, vindictive, unbalanced, or some combination thereof—all seem to cross paths. Beatty is terrific as the classic Me Generation male, announcing that bedding all these women makes him “feel like I’m gonna live forever.” In the end, though, Shampoo is more than a vicarious romp; it’s a statement about the ways we sabotage our own pursuits of love and happiness. Fine performances abound, Paul Simon’s music keeps things rolling, and the haircuts alone are worth the price.
Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (dir: Spike Lee, 1982) If churches can be said to be the anchor of many a black neighborhood, then barbershops are their secular counterpart. Oddly, this rich vein of cinematic material has gone largely unmined, aside from the tepid ’70s film Five on the Black Hand Side and an equally middling sitcom from the same period, That’s My Mama. One of the few filmmakers to do the subject justice was a scrawny NYU film student named Spike Lee, who crafted this tale of a Brooklyn clip joint under siege by racketeers. Lee’s thesis project was good enough to garner a special award from the Motion Picture Academy; while it won’t make you forget his later work, it displays his gifts for atmosphere and dialogue, and it’s worth a look for anyone interested in assessing the artist as a young man. Despite the acclaim, it took Lee four more years to raise the money for his low-budget breakthrough, She’s Gotta Have It.
Educating Rita (dir: Lewis Gilbert, 1983) A Pygmalion-like tale about a whiskey-soaked literature professor whose world is rocked by a saucy hairdresser. Despite her clackety high heels and her garbled essays comparing E.M. Forster with Harold Robbins, the professor sees in her a passion that’s utterly lacking in his ivory-tower existence. Demanding to cut his shaggy hair, she tells him, “I’m gonna take 10 years off ya”; that she does, though in the end she does it more through her resiliency and fire than through her way with a set of clippers.
Steel Magnolias (dir: Herbert Ross, 1989) The term “chick flick” may well be traceable to this film, which tends to fall into the “love it or hate it” category. This film is interesting, though, because it’s one of the few movies to make the beauty shop its nexus. At the center of the tear-jerking action is Truvy Jones (Dolly Parton), who slings hair and lends a sympathetic shoulder to the small-town Southern ladies who visit her shop. Miss Dolly’s performance is tops among the all-star cast. Olympia Dukakis, on the other hand, is badly miscast; she sounds as though she’s confused the Canadian border with the Mason Dixon line.
The Hairdresser’s Husband (dir: Patrice Leconte, 1990) The subtle, sweetly told tale of a sad-sack Frenchman (wonderfully played by Jean Rochefort) unable to overcome his childhood fixation with a chesty neighborhood haircutter. Flashing ahead several decades, we find our lonesome hero now enamored of a wistful beauty (Anna Galiena, a Mimi Rogers look-alike) he spies working in a small salon. Their romance is bathed in an unmistakable glow of tenderness, but the film also manages to be a celebration of the sort of good, clean fetishism to which most American moviemakers stand oblivious. Were the Hollywood studios to get hold of this, they’d likely spruce it up with a nude shaving cream fight.
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