General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

At Long Last Love

At Long Last Love is a 1975 American musical comedy directed, written, and produced by Peter Bogdanovich, built around sixteen songs by Cole Porter and starring Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and the Italian actor Duilio Del Prete as four wealthy New Yorkers who meet, pair off, and swap partners in a stylized 1935 setting.¹^•² Made for about $6 million, it earned roughly $1.5 million worldwide, opened at Radio City Music Hall to scathing reviews, and prompted Bogdanovich to publish an open letter of apology in newspapers across the United States.²^•³ In later decades the film was reappraised, most prominently by Richard Brody of The New Yorker, who called it an overlooked masterwork.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Release	Premiered March 1, 1975 at 20th Century-Fox Studios, Los Angeles; New York opening March 6, 1975; Los Angeles opening March 26, 1975¹
Music	Sixteen Cole Porter songs in the released film, from a pre-production script with twenty-three, including rarely heard opening verses¹
Cast	Burt Reynolds (Michael Oliver Pritchard III), Cybill Shepherd (Brooke Carter), Madeline Kahn (Kitty O'Kelly), Duilio Del Prete (Johnny Spanish), Eileen Brennan (Elizabeth), John Hillerman (Rodney James)²
Budget and gross	$6 million budget; $1.5 million gross worldwide²
Critical reception	23% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 64 reviews; 40% audience score⁵
Competing versions	Cuts of 105, 115, 118, 121, and 123 minutes have circulated; the 2013 Blu-ray carried Bogdanovich's 123-minute "Definitive Director's Version"¹
Rights	Disney acquired the rights in its 20th Century Fox merger; no complete version containing all musical numbers has been made commercially accessible⁶

Spoilers

Plot and style

The story is a roundelay of romantic mix-ups among four socialites. Heiress Brooke Carter runs into the Italian gambler Johnny Spanish at the racetrack, while playboy Michael Oliver Pritchard III nearly runs over stage star Kitty O'Kelly with his car. Backstage at Kitty's show, Kitty and Brooke discover they are old friends from public school, and the foursome, joined by Elizabeth and Rodney, paint the town in Art Deco splendor, singing Porter songs in posh hotels, taxicabs, parks, swimming pools, and bathtubs before pairing off with more appropriate partners.⁸^•¹

The film's look was deliberately archival. Bogdanovich aimed at the Art Deco Lubitsch-Paramount manner of early 1930s musical comedy, brought back just as it was rather than filtered through a 1970s sensibility.¹⁰ The sets and costumes, done in sleek blacks and whites, aimed at a "black and white in color" effect.⁵ Film scholars have placed it among the era's musicals that looked backward rather than forward, an emergent text drawing on non-American and classical styles rather than the residual classical-Hollywood product of the same years.¹¹

Production

Bogdanovich came to the project at the height of his early-1970s success. After the hits What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, and the poorly received Daisy Miller (1974), he looked again to classic Hollywood for inspiration.⁷ In March 1974 he finalized a $5 million deal with Twentieth Century-Fox, with principal photography scheduled to begin in June 1974 in Los Angeles; production ran from July 30 to early November 1974.¹ The idea came from a personal source: Cybill Shepherd, who was his girlfriend at the time, presented him with a collection of Cole Porter songs, and this present inspired him to create a musical built on the songwriter's lyrics.³

Casting changed repeatedly. The casting went through many revisions. At first, Bogdanovich intended to appear on screen in the picture, but he then stepped aside for Elliott Gould, whose background was in musical theater; once Gould and Ryan O'Neal both withdrew, the male starring role went to Burt Reynolds, a decision that Bogdanovich later described as one he had been persuaded to accept.³ The supporting cast included Madeline Kahn as Broadway singer Kitty O'Kelly, Eileen Brennan as the maid Elizabeth, John Hillerman as the chauffeur Rodney James, and Mildred Natwick as Michael's mother Mabel.²^•⁸

Live singing. To recreate the spontaneous feel of Ernst Lubitsch musicals such as The Love Parade, with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, Bogdanovich had every song sequence filmed live, with the performers singing as they acted. Since the leads, especially Reynolds, were not accomplished singers or dancers, this caused delays and mess-ups on set.³ The technique of recording the singing live had been utilized in the 1964 film My Fair Lady, when Rex Harrison performed his musical numbers live on the set.⁹^•¹⁶ The result, as Richard Brody described it, was a film filled with Porter songs performed in long takes, from solos to duets, trios, and quartets staged among astonished crowds, including a sextet version of "Friendship" in the close quarters of a Rolls-Royce.⁴

Release and reception

The film opened at Radio City Music Hall on March 6, 1975 to reviews that the Austin Film Society describes as hard to overstate in their hostility; at the time, it occupied a place at the bottom of the conventional-taste pyramid later filled by films like Ishtar and Gigli.⁷ Critics were split on whether Bogdanovich's attempt to resurrect an earlier period of filmmaking was "audacious," as The New York Times had it, or "embarrassing," as Variety put it.¹ Judith Crist wrote that Shepherd and Reynolds "can neither dance nor sing" and between them reduced most of the Porter songs to a repetitious blur.⁵ Pauline Kael's negative review in The New Yorker was titled "The Rear Guard."¹⁰ Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was a dissenting voice, calling it a light, stylish entertainment whose vicious critical treatment he could not account for.¹²

The apology letter. After the scathing opening, Bogdanovich had an open letter of apology for the film printed in newspapers throughout the United States.³ The commercial failure was severe: against a $6 million budget, the film grossed about $1.5 million.² Its flop shaped the marketing of later musicals; one scholar notes that Robert Altman's Nashville was released after the massive flop of At Long Last Love and carried a cautious, split marketing campaign.¹³

The many versions

No film of the period has a more tangled textual history. Bogdanovich's constant tinkering during previews produced three different cuts, ranging from 105 to 118 minutes, and one of these was used for a 1981 videotape release.¹ After the unfavorable Radio City opening, Bogdanovich cut nine minutes from the 114-minute running time, removing the songs "From Alpha To Omega," "I Loved Him," and "Let's Misbehave," along with a reprise of "It's De-Lovely" and a minute of Shepherd's bathtub rendition of "Which?".¹ Two numbers, "Down in the Depths" and "Tomorrow," designed to introduce Kahn's and Del Prete's characters, had already been deleted from the release print, apparently because studio heads wanted the focus on the above-the-title stars Shepherd and Reynolds.²

The Blakely edit. Jim Blakely, an editor who had spent many years at the studio, put together without authorization a 121-minute cut of his own based on the shooting script Peter Bogdanovich had used, and by 1979 at the latest he had replaced the official release with this cut as the standard one, all without his role coming to light before his death.³ When Netflix streamed the film in 2013, it used this fourth, unauthorized version.¹ For the film's first-ever home video edition, a limited Blu-ray from Twilight Time and Fox in 2013, Bogdanovich cut his own "Definitive Director's Version," the longest at 123 minutes, presumably with all the original songs intact.¹^•² Even so, no complete production of the film containing all its musical numbers has been made accessible commercially or otherwise, and Disney's acquisition of the rights in its 20th Century Fox merger means it will likely remain legally unavailable for the foreseeable future.⁶

Reappraisal

Reception of the film has divided sharply along lines of time and taste. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds 23 percent among critics against 40 percent among audiences, a gap the aggregation site CineGraph flags as a "polarizer" pattern of divided response.⁵^•¹⁴ Richard Brody, reviewing a 2018 Quad Cinema retrospective, called it "a blazingly original masterwork" whose originality partly explained its rejection at release, including by Pauline Kael herself.⁴ The 2013 restoration prompted a partial reassessment elsewhere too: Jeffrey Kauffman's contemporaneous account argued the film was largely undeserving of its reputation as an unmitigated bomb, and noted that Woody Allen, who has spoken of his fondness for it, drew on it for his own musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996).¹⁵ The Austin Film Society's retrospective framing was that, in hindsight, the film could have been as popular as What's Up, Doc? had the mood of the country not turned so sour.⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026