Plot
Shampoo is set during a 24-hour period in 1968, on the eve of a presidential election that would result in Richard Nixon's election to the American presidency. George Roundy (Warren Beatty) is a successful Beverly Hills hairdresser, whose occupation and charisma have provided him the perfect platform from which to meet, and bed, beautiful women, including his current girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn).
Despite this, George is dissatisfied with his professional life; he is clearly the creative star of the salon, but is forced to play second fiddle to the "nickel-and-diming," mediocre hairdresser who owns the place. He dreams of setting up his own salon business, but lacking the cash to do so, turns to wealthy lover Felicia (Lee Grant) and her unsuspecting husband Lester (Jack Warden) to bankroll him. George's meeting with Lester supplies a second secret for him to keep from his would-be benefactor: Lester's current mistress, Jackie (Julie Christie), is George's former girlfriend, perhaps the most serious relationship he has ever had.
Lester, who assumes George is gay, invites him to escort Jackie to a Republican Party election night soiree, at which George finds himself in the same room as a number of present and former sexual partners. The principals adjourn to a posh counterculture party, and the night quickly descends into drugs, alcohol and sexual indulgence. In the film's dramatic climax, Lester and Jill happen upon George and Jackie having vigorous sex on a kitchen floor. Just before their identities are revealed, an impressed Lester exclaims: "Now, that's what I call fucking!" When Jill recognizes the writhing couple, she throws a chair at them; as George backpedals, trying to placate Jill, Jackie sees him for the cad he is, and flees.
George realizes that Jackie is his true love and proposes to her. By then, however, it is too late: Jackie announces that Lester is divorcing Felicia and taking Jackie to Acapulco. With Felicia gone, Jill gone, and now Jackie gone, the film thus pairs sexual revelation with George's deeper moral development, but ends bleakly for the protagonist, despite his epiphany.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)