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May be the worst movie musical of this - or any - decade... Sitting through this movie is like having someone at a fancy Parisian restaurant who neither speaks nor reads French read out stentoriously the entire long menu in his best Arkansas accent, and occasionally interrupt himself to chortle at his cleverness.
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| (John Simon, National Review) |
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If this Peter Bogdanovich fiasco were any more of a dog, it would shed.
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| (John Barbour, Los Angeles) |
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Failure so dismal that it goes beyond failure. The musical is not trash, exactly. Its rottenness lies in the pretension and inflated ego behind its conception, in its pandering to film-buff nostalgia, and in some of the sorriest casting ever to sink a production.
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| (Hollis Alpert, Saturday Review) |
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It just lies there and it dies there.
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| (Variety) |
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A shameful failure... infantile... relentlessly vapid.
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| (Pauline Kael, New Yorker) |
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This Cole Porter coloring book, mounted with great expense and no taste, is one of those grand catastrophes that make audiences wither hoot in derisive surprise or look away in embarrassment. In dancing [the stars] resemble a troop of hikers trying to extinguish a campfire. The sets and costumes are of such resplendent ugliness that they go beyond campiness.
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| (Jay Cocks, Time) |
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The most perverse movie musical ever made... a colossal, overextravagant in-joke.... Every time his stars open their mouths or shake their legs, they trample on Cole Porter’s grave... when the leads break into song and dance at a night- club or a cotillion, the extras just stand there like goons, staring off into space; it’s like watching a musical unfold within The Night of the Living Dead.
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| (Frank Rich, New Times) |
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As for Burt Reynolds as a jaded millionaire playboy . . . there is in Funny Lady a buffalo named Charles, whom Billy Rose insists on displaying in a musical, where, on opening night, he creates havoc by improvising a one- buffalo stampede. Well, put a dinner jacket on Charles, and you've got Reynolds in At Long Last Love, except that he never musters enough animation for a stampede.
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| (John Simon, National Review) |
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[Burt Reynolds] sings like Dean Martin with adenoids and dances like a drunk killing cockroaches.
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| (John Barbour, Los Angeles) |
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Starring Cybill Shepherd and Burt Reynolds, who have, between them, four left feet and who sing with a gallantry that reminds me of small children taking their first solo swim across the deep end... Shepherd is a leading lady who can neither sing nor dance and who apparently thinks badinage is something you put on a small cut.
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| (Vincent Canby, New York Times) |
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Cybill Shepherd, Mr B's inamorata, plays a poor little snotty rich girl with a notion of sophistication that is underpassed onIy by her acting ability. (I will not even sully my pen by making it describe her singing and dancing.) If it weren't for an asinine superciliousness radiating from her, Miss Shepherd would actually be pitiable, rather like a kid from an orphanage trying to play Noel Coward. In fact, she comes across like one of those inanimate objects, say, a cupboard or a grandfather clock, which is made in certain humorous shorts to act, through trick photography, like people. Well, Bogdanovich is truly in love with Miss Shepherd, so one cannot call his slapping her into the lead of almost every one of his films the casting-couch approach; yet even those crude old-time producers who did have the crassness to use that method at least had the good sense to cast the girl, not the couch.
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| (John Simon, National Review) |
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As for Shepherd’s dancing, the best to be said is that it may not be recognizable as such: when this horsey ex-model starts prancing around, she tends to look as if she’s fighting off a chronic case of trots.
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| (Frank Rich, New Times) |
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Duilio Del Prete, an Italian discovery, sings as if he came to paint the mansion and stayed on to regale the company with wobbly impersonations of Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier.
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| (Bruce Williamson, Playboy) |
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As a merry Italian Lothario, we get Duilio Del Prete, an Italian nonactor... Mr Del Prete might conceivably play a street arab, but in a sophisticated role, with his thick accent and thin talent, he has as much charm as a broomstick with a smile painted on it.
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| (John Simon, National Review) |
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, Cybill Shepherd 
