The most famous flop that was not quite a flop
Few films arrive with a reputation already written for them. Ishtar did. By the time Elaine May’s 1987 comedy reached cinemas, newspapers had already told the story: a troubled production, a ballooning budget, two huge stars, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, playing talentless songwriters lost in North Africa. The film became shorthand for Hollywood excess, and for years it was easier to repeat the joke than to watch the film. Watch it now, with fresh eyes, and a stranger, funnier, more interesting movie appears: a comedy about two men who are terrible at almost everything, except believing in themselves.
Hoffman plays Chuck Clarke, one half of a songwriting duo with Beatty’s Lyle Rogers. Chuck and Lyle are not secret geniuses. Their songs are clumsy, their harmonies are off, and their big break is a booking in Morocco, where they promptly get caught up in a Cold War plot involving a blind camel, a revolutionary, and a map that everyone wants. The comedy comes not from their competence, but from their complete lack of it, combined with a total inability to notice. Hoffman, who had spent two decades playing intense, watchful men, here plays a man who watches the wrong things, at the wrong time, with total confidence.
That is a harder comic performance than it looks. Chuck has to be foolish without being cruel, and earnest without being sentimental. Hoffman gives him a nervous, eager energy, always a beat ahead of Lyle, always ready with a new plan that will make everything worse. His singing, deliberately bad, is a comic instrument in itself: flat, rushed, and delivered with the pride of a man who thinks he has just written a hit. It is a performance that asks the audience to laugh at Chuck, and also to like him, and Hoffman balances those two responses with a lightness that his more dramatic roles rarely required.
Two songwriters, one desert, no plan
The plot, such as it is, follows Chuck and Lyle from New York to Morocco, where they are hired to perform in a hotel and instead become pawns in a struggle between American intelligence, a local emir, and a revolutionary leader named Shirra Assel, played by Isabelle Adjani. Neither man understands what is happening, and the film’s pleasure is in watching them misunderstand it in increasingly elaborate ways. They think they are being helpful. They think they are being brave. They are mostly being in the way.
Elaine May, who wrote and directed the film, had a particular comic sensibility: she liked characters who talked too much, explained too little, and created chaos by trying to be reasonable. Hoffman fits that world perfectly. His Chuck talks in long, tangled sentences, full of qualifications and second thoughts, and then acts as if he has just been perfectly clear. Beatty’s Lyle is quieter, more bewildered, and the contrast gives their duo a rhythm: Chuck plans, Lyle follows, both get lost. Their friendship, for all its bickering, is genuine, and it is the film’s emotional centre. These are two men who have failed together for so long that failure has become a kind of loyalty.
The desert setting gives May room to play with scale. Wide shots of dunes and markets make Chuck and Lyle look very small, and that smallness is the joke. They are not heroes in a spy film; they are lounge acts in a spy film, and the film never lets them forget it. The camel, the map, the CIA agent played by Charles Grodin, all operate at a level of seriousness that Chuck and Lyle cannot match, and their attempts to match it produce the film’s best scenes. Hoffman, in particular, has a gift for playing a man who is trying to look competent while doing something obviously incompetent, and Ishtar gives him scene after scene in which to use it.
Production, budget, and the story that swallowed the film
Ishtar’s reputation was shaped, to a large extent, before anyone saw it. The production filmed in Morocco and New York, ran over schedule, and cost far more than a comedy about two bad songwriters was expected to cost. Reports of difficulties on set, and of tension between May and the studio, circulated widely. By release, the film was treated less as a movie than as a cautionary tale, and its box-office failure seemed to confirm the story that had already been told about it.
That context matters, because it explains why Ishtar was dismissed, but it does not explain the film itself. May was a brilliant, exacting director, and her comedy is not broad or easy. It rewards attention to dialogue, to timing, and to the small ways people deceive themselves. Audiences in 1987, primed to expect a disaster, may have found that subtlety frustrating. Later audiences, watching without the baggage of the production stories, have often found a much funnier film, and critics revisiting it in the 2010s began to argue for it as a misunderstood comedy, even a cult classic.
Hoffman’s own career helps explain why the film still fascinates. He had just come from a run of serious, acclaimed work, and Ishtar was a risk: a comedy that required him to be unglamorous, uncool, and musically hopeless. He takes that risk fully. There is no wink to the audience, no suggestion that Chuck is secretly talented, no rescue by a dramatic scene. Hoffman commits to the joke, and that commitment is what makes the joke work. When Chuck sings, badly, with total conviction, you are laughing at a man who believes in himself, and Hoffman makes that belief both absurd and oddly touching.
Why Ishtar deserves a second listen
The songs in Ishtar, written by Paul Williams and others, are deliberately terrible, and that is a difficult trick to pull off. They have to be bad enough to be funny, but structured enough to sound like real songs that two hopeful men might actually write. Hoffman and Beatty perform them with the earnestness of musicians who have never been told the truth, and the result is a kind of anti-musical: a film about songwriting in which the songs are the problem, not the solution. For a site like Past Tunes, which follows the stories behind songs, that idea is rich. Chuck and Lyle are not the voices of a generation. They are the voices in the next room, rehearsing, hoping, and getting it wrong, and there is something recognisably human in that hope.
Ishtar also belongs in Hoffman’s story because it shows his comic range. After Tootsie, audiences knew he could be funny in a film built around a brilliant comic premise. Ishtar asks him to be funny in a film built around a terrible comic premise, played straight. That is a different skill, and Hoffman brings to it the same close observation he brought to his dramas. He watches how a bad songwriter stands, how he holds a guitar, how he nods along to his own lyric as if it were profound. The details are small, but they accumulate into a character who feels real, even when the plot around him becomes gloriously absurd.
Watch Ishtar today and you will still hear the old jokes about its budget, but you may also hear something else: two actors, at the height of their fame, willing to look foolish for a comedy they believed in, directed by a filmmaker who trusted her audience to follow a complicated joke. Hoffman’s Chuck Clarke is not a great man, and he is not a great songwriter. He is a man who keeps singing, even when no one is listening, and who keeps believing that the next song will be the one. That stubborn, tuneless optimism is, in its own way, a signature Hoffman quality: the refusal to quit, played here not as drama, but as comedy.