Ishtar (film)
Ishtar is a 1987 American adventure-comedy film written and directed by Elaine May, and produced by Warren Beatty, who co-stars opposite Dustin Hoffman. The story revolves around a duo of talentless American songwriters who travel to a booking in Morocco and stumble into a four-party Cold War standoff.
Ishtar
Elaine May
- Dustin Hoffman
- Warren Beatty
- Isabelle Adjani
- Charles Grodin
- Jack Weston
- Richard P. Cirincione
- William H. Reynolds
- Stephen A. Rotter
- Bahjawa
- Dave Grusin
- Paul Williams
- May 15, 1987
107 minutes
United States
English
$51 million[1]
$14.4 million[2]
Shot on location in Morocco and New York City by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, the production drew media attention before its release for substantial cost overruns on top of a lavish budget, and reports of clashes between May, Beatty, and Storaro. A change in studio management at Columbia Pictures during post-production also led to professional and personal difficulties that undermined the film's release.
Ishtar polarized critics and became a notorious failure at the box office. Many initially considered it to be one of the worst films ever made, although critical support has increased significantly since release,[a] to the point where it received two votes for the Greatest Movie of All Time in the 2022 iteration of the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound decennial polls. Its 2004 DVD release excluded North America, where a director's cut, running two minutes shorter, was released on Blu-ray in August 2013.[10]
Plot[edit]
Chuck Clarke and Lyle Rogers are inept songwriters who are down on their luck, but dream of becoming a popular singing duo like Simon and Garfunkel. Though they are poorly received at a local open-microphone night, agent Marty Freed offers to book them as lounge singers in a hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, explaining that the last act quit due to political unrest in the area. Nearly broke, both single, and without any better options, Lyle and Chuck decide to take the gig.
When they arrive in the fictional neighboring country of Ishtar, Chuck agrees to give his passport to a mysterious woman who claims her life is in danger. She promises to meet him in Marrakesh. Unfortunately, Chuck learns at the U.S. Embassy that it will take longer than expected to get a new passport. Lyle goes to Morocco in a bid to save their booking while Chuck stays behind.
Alone in Ishtar, Chuck meets CIA agent Jim Harrison. Chuck agrees to be a mole for the CIA and, in return, Harrison gets Chuck to Morocco by the next evening.
Now together again, Chuck and Lyle unwittingly become involved in a plot to overthrow the Emir of Ishtar. The mysterious woman, Shirra Assel, sneaks into Lyle's room and tries to steal his luggage, mistaking it for Chuck's. At the airport, she had stuck some of her items into Chuck's luggage, because that was her only way of smuggling them out of Ishtar. She later breaks into their room and goes through Chuck's luggage, but she fails to find an ancient, prophetic map that her archaeologist brother Omar had found. Shirra needs this map in order to command the loyalties of the left-wing guerrillas who oppose the government of Ishtar.
Shirra later confronts Chuck and accuses him of working with the CIA, and Chuck accuses her of being a communist. Meanwhile, Lyle attempts to find a camel salesman named Mohamad and gives him the secret code of "I want to buy a blind camel," as per Shirra's instructions, but Lyle finds the wrong Mohamad and ends up actually buying a blind camel. Chuck and Lyle receive instructions from both the CIA and the leftist guerillas to go into the desert, and both parties actually intend for them to die there.
In the desert, Chuck pulls his jacket over his head to shield himself from the sun, and Lyle sees that the legendary map is sewn inside of the jacket. The jacket was originally Omar's, but Shirra took it, and then Chuck and Shirra traded jackets. The CIA sends helicopters to finish off Chuck and Lyle, but Shirra and a cab driver arrive in the desert and defend them.
Chuck and Lyle mail the map to their agent Marty Freed, who blackmails the CIA with the map. The CIA ends up having to support Shirra leading social reforms in the country, and back an album written by Rogers and Clarke with a tour starting in Morocco. At the show, Shirra is in the audience. Meanwhile, a military officer orders the rest of the men in uniform that make up the audience to "APPLAUD!" when the songs are finished.
Release[edit]
Box office[edit]
Negative buzz about Ishtar and its high budget was widespread in the press long before the film reached theaters. In an interview with May, Mike Nichols described the bomb as "the prime example that I know of in Hollywood of studio suicide",[19] implying that Puttnam sandbagged the project by leaking negative anecdotes to the media because of his grudges against Beatty and Hoffman.[20] Before release, market research led Columbia to believe the film would fail. Its head of marketing, Peter Sealey, advised the studio to minimize its losses by cutting the film's advertising budget. Instead, Columbia spent even more to promote the film, afraid of alienating Beatty and Hoffman. "Ego trumps logic in Hollywood," said Sealey.[21]
Despite negative press, three previews went well, with Beatty describing one in Toronto as the best he had ever had, and he and the studio considered striking more prints. Those discussions ended following the opening weekend, wherein Ishtar, on more than 1,000 screens across the country, took in $4.2 million (equivalent to $11.3 million in 2023) in receipts, winning the weekend, being No. 1 at the box office.[2] However, it outgrossed The Gate—a low-budget horror film with no stars—by a mere $100,000,[11] and ultimately earned $14.3 million at the North American box office.[22]
Against a $51 million production budget and up to another $20 million spent on prints and marketing costs, the film is estimated to have lost $40 million.[1][23] Ishtar has become synonymous with the phrase "box office flop",[20] and in 2014, the Los Angeles Times listed the film as one of the most expensive box-office flops of all time.[24]
Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum surmised that the media were eager to torpedo Ishtar in retaliation for instances of Beatty's perceived "high-handed way with members of the press".[25] The film had been completely closed to the media, with no reporters at all permitted on set during production, a restriction greater than Beatty's previous productions.[12] Specifically, Rosenbaum mentions critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert: "he was really getting them very irritated, and using them as the butt of all these jokes, and so on. And so the point is that if you start multiplying that in terms of the treatment [of] a lot of other people in the press, Ishtar was their one chance finally to get even."
Critical reception[edit]
The film had a polarizing effect on critics upon release. The Washington Post's critics were split: Desson Thomson described the film as an "unabashed vamp for a pair of household names, and as such it works, often hilariously",[26] while Hal Hinson wrote that "it's piddling—a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs."[26] Ebert wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times that "Ishtar is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy"[27] and Siskel called it "shockingly dull" and "dim-witted";[28] together, they selected it as the worst film of 1987 on At the Movies.[29] Janet Maslin of The New York Times was more forgiving, writing "The worst of it is painless; the best is funny, sly, cheerful and, here and there, even genuinely inspired."[30] Vincent Canby—also for the Times—listed it as a runner-up to his top films of 1987.[31]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 40% of 58 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and laughter itself get lost in the desert during a flawed spoof of classic road movies that proves ill-suited for its mismatched and miscast stars."[32] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 51 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[33] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "C+" on scale of A+ to F.[34]