In Manhattan, the air is crowded, the people jaded, and the racket tireless. But in Peter Bogdanovich’s Manhattan, crosswalks are merely optional, light jogs are city transit, and an effervescent love has swept up the city and all its citizens.
They All Laughed (1981) calls itself “a New York romance,” a nebulous summary telling very little, although still ample, for indeed it is a romance movie based in New York and for New York, and where New York only is ever romantic. Or perhaps too, New York is the tangible nucleus of romance altogether.
In any case, the particulars don’t so much matter in They All Laughed. The film takes form as one long carousel of fantasy and desire, unknown to when the ride has started or when exactly it will stop. For the first short while, the audience plays catch-up as they settle into a magnetic chemistry permeating the metropolitan cityscape, and yet see a New York small and full of make-believe innocence. They watch and then assimilate. And then suddenly, all at once, they’ve got something like a screwball comedy packed with idiosyncratic private investigators and alluring women, observing and yearning for one another. A film where to kiss is to say hello.
Bogdanovich’s personalities are always on their way somewhere, anywhere, but never arriving. A perpetual game of voyeuristic tag begins when the Odyssey Detective Agency is hired by two different husbands to follow their wives, and inadvertently are hired, as well, to fall madly in love with them. PIs Charles (John Ritter) and Arthur (Blaine Novak) chase after angelic Dolores (Dorothy Stratten) as she skips around town with a glitzy smile to hotels, shoe stores, and eventually into Charles’ embrace. Likewise, effortlessly elegant Audrey Hepburn, playing the role of untruthful wife Angela, finds herself in bed with PI John Russo (Ben Gazzara), whispering gentle passions back and forth.
Within the film’s fairytale is a melancholic language of heartache and loneliness. There is an inferred nostalgia that comes with its title, as Bogdanovich has suggested, that the past tense fossilizes the film as a time capsule of what once was. New York has since said goodbye to many elements of the film, such as the twin towers (featured in the introduction) in 2001 and many cast members, including Stratten in 1980 and Bogdanovich in 2022, slowly aging away from the tender years of They All Laughed. The film is dedicated to Stratten, who was murdered at 20 years old, months after principal photography. It is apparent filmmaker Bogdanovich is infused in the film, lovingly admiring Stratten with the camera, as they had been having an affair both as an act in the film and outside of it.
His grief is preserved in his poor efforts to distribute, and their love is preserved in the backdrop of New York.