If you're curious about California, at least southern California, go see Shampoo, it won't lie to you. I went to Hollywood for the first time about a year ago with tickets to the Academy Awards. The day before the big show, I picked up a friend at a swank L.A. beauty parlor and there was this tall blonde guy named Phillippe or something leaning over her cooing, "I am going to make you beautiful, so beautiful." He believed what he was saying, and later when I saw my friend at a party after the Awards, I could tell that she believed him too. Shampoo tells the truth so confidently, skewers the place so smoothly that its evaluation becomes nearly definitive. Warren Beatty's George the hairdresser hardly says a full sentence for the entire film, mostly he grunts and stutters, but he comes from a culture which doesn't put much value on words anyway: the people who talk a lot in Shampoo are branded liars, most notably the imposed, looming presence's of Nixon and Agnew. George just wants to peel off his jeans and hump, hump, hump, and hump more. Strangely enough, all the women around seem to want to do the same thing. I don't want to hear anything more about Peter Fonda in Easy Rider--George the hairdresser is more interesting and significant if we're talking about byproducts of the sixties. Beauty's performance is very, very good and so is Jack Warden's.

But if you really want to go after California with a vengeance, catch Earthquake before the chance is lost. If you don't see (feel) this magnificent schlock, it's your loss. Sensurround--the greatest innovation to hit movies since 3D glasses--feels like a bout on a motel room bed with the Magic Fingers massager. Sure the script and actors are worthless (except for old Lloyd Nolan) but when the Sensurround starts, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. They set up these big 15 foot speakers, see and when it's time for the quake, big waves of low intensity sound roll out across the audience, untying shoelaces and knocking out denture plates. The special effects put DeMille to shame and if you're from the cast, the sight of seeing the Wicked Witch of the West crumble into stinking ashes will fill you with joy for days. They're not going to make any disaster films that will beat this for fun A piece of advice sit in the front row to get the full effect of Sensurround but remember, "The Management is not responsible" for deafness, heart-attacks or religious visions which occur as a result.

The Four Musketeers. The first part of this was fun, but this extension is a serious rip-off. Richard Lester knows his craft as a director; certainly this is a beautiful movie visually and it is fast. But too fast and skimpy. They filmed the whole of this to be released as one picture, but somebody decided they could milk us for two. Sneak in the back and have a nice time, but the self-respecting ought not give those bastards the satisfaction of paying $2.50 for excess footage.

At Long Last Love. Bogdanovich, P. (American film director) is on his professional premature death bed. No one need ask who done it; he done it himself. His latest picture is, as Variety might put it, stinko. Not only that, it is expensive, personalized stinko. Worst of all, this leaden dirigible dragged some very talented people down with it, including Cole Porter, a hard man to sink. When a friend of mine stole the script from Twentieth Century Fox and lent it to me, the two of us sat rocking on chairs for the better part of an afternoon rubbing our eyes and groaning, "It's awful. Awful." It was a terrible script, and it is hard to see what Bogdanovich was trying to do. It's not witty, it's not good-looking, it's not even fun. "It's intentionally bad," Bogdanovich told a bewildered interviewer in last week's Village Voice, going on to explain that he was making a movie about people who "happen to sing and dance because they feel like it." But this film has neither the substance nor the charm to subsidize that kind of indulgence. A plot it's not got; that would be all right if someone could sing or dance or the images were interesting. Ernst Lubitsch made some of the most marvellous musicals of the thirties with no plot--the films just flowed along. Fred Astaire's movies didn't have to do much at all except display the man who defied all physical laws. But Bogdanovich has succeeded in no corner, and yet acknowledges them all. He has a depressing, overwhelming amount of film knowledge (he is by far the most eclectic filmmaker anywhere) and flaunts it shamelessly, creating uninspired, cranky work which worships style but doesn't understand it. No one has a right to impose this type of self-adulating, strangely misanthropic garbage on movie-goers. Only Madeline Kahn isn't buried. It would take a bigger disaster than even Bogdanovich could create to do that. Peter W. Kaplan

And Now for Something Completely Different. Monty Python finally reached respectability this week, with a two-page spread in Newsweek. Apparently a second Monty Python movie, called Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is showing in Los Angeles, but if you're not going to LA for spring break you'll have to settle for this superb, incredibly funny film. Channel 2 has started showing Monty Python TV episodes and they've been phenomenally successful in the ratings, outdrawing even "Upstairs, Downstairs," so it looks like Dennis Moore and Mr. Verity and the Man From The Cat Detector Van will be around for a long time. If you haven't seen this movie yet, take advantage of its timely showing at the Harvard Square. Or if you must, go to see Take the Money and Run on the same bill--you remember, that's the one where Woody Allen tries to escape from prison with a take pistol that he whittled out of soap and it rains--but be sure to stay for Monty Python.

The Third Man. One of those films, like Casablanca, where every word and every scene seem just right, and memorable. Nearly perfect. A Touch of Evil, playing with it, isn't half-bad either.

Amarcord. The lines for this one stretched around the block last week when it played at the Harvard Square. Fellini's latest, long, mellow, beautiful. Not very meaty, though   Paul K. Rowe