Fashion Victims

Hollywood has always had the ability to turn something that is very new into something that is very old very quickly. Right now that seems to be happening with the retro duds genre. What started out as a good idea with films like Dazed and Confused, Boogie Nights and Velvet Goldmine--which introduced the young to the terrifying fashions of the '70s, while serving as a grim reminder to Baby Boomers who had lived through that sartorially toxic era--is now getting a bit out of hand.

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Weird '70s styles have dominated films from Auto Focus, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Ali to The Ladies Man, Undercover Brother, The Banger Sisters, Moonlight Mile and, of course, Almost Famous. This obsession with the lifestyles of the rich and/or oddly dressed now also encompasses the '60s (Catch Me If You Can; Down with Love; Girl, Interrupted; the Austin Powers series), and the '50s (Far from Heaven, Mona Lisa Smile, The Hours). If Hollywood doesn't get a grip soon, we're going to have Rosie O'Donnell dressed like Twiggy.

Obviously, there are clear advantages to setting movies in the relatively recent past. One reason the first two Godfather movies have not dated is because they were set in a dimly remembered period where people apparently wore some pretty swanky clothes. (The same is true of Chinatown, one of the best and best-looking movies ever set in the '30s or any other era.) Unlike other movies made in the '70s, where the clothes and hairstyles now look preposterous (The Parallax View, The Killer Elite), the Godfather movies still look absolutely fantastic. Unencumbered by bellbottoms, paisley and shags, they look as "classic" today as they did when they were made. At no point do the clothes and hairstyles hijack the motion pictures; the clothes are simply things that people wore. After all, you can't whack stoolies in your birthday suit.

By contrast, Auto Focus was almost entirely about clothing. Indeed, one of the most engrossing aspects of Paul Shrader's creepy biopic about Bob Crane, the doomed, twisted star of TV's "Hogan's Heroes," is guessing what unnerving outfit Crane's pal, played by Willem Dafoe, will turn up in next. Throughout the film, it was a mystery to me why Crane could not see that his unhealthy relationship with his babe-procuring sidekick would ultimately lead to homicide. As soon as Dafoe turned up in the checked bells, most men would have realized that this unwholesome liaison was heading straight for a date with the mortician. A grown man who would wear both checked bells and a Beatles perm was obviously capable of anything. I'm surprised a platform shoe wasn't the murder weapon.

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