Rippled sand dunes in a desert. Photo by Sahir Sujahudeen on Pexels.
Two songwriters lost in the desert
In Ishtar (1987), Warren Beatty plays Lyle Rogers, one half of a spectacularly unsuccessful songwriting duo, opposite Dustin Hoffman as Chuck Clarke. Directed by Elaine May, the film follows Lyle and Chuck from New York lounges, where their songs are met with polite indifference, to a booking in Morocco that turns out to be a front for CIA intrigue. Lyle is the smoother of the pair, a would-be ladies’ man with a guitar and a grin, convinced that talent and charm will eventually be recognised. Beatty plays him with a cheerful, almost serene lack of self-awareness. Lyle genuinely believes his songs are good, and that belief, maintained in the face of all evidence, is the film’s great comic engine.
The joke of Ishtar is not that Lyle and Chuck are bad musicians in a conventional sense. Their songs, written by Paul Williams, are witty, tuneful, and just slightly wrong: rhymes that do not quite land, metaphors that collapse halfway through, sentiments that are a beat too earnest. Beatty performs them with complete sincerity, strumming earnestly while Hoffman harmonises beside him, and the effect is both funny and oddly affectionate. May directs the musical numbers as if they were serious performances, which makes them funnier still. Lyle is not a fool. He is a man whose confidence has outpaced his talent by only a small margin, and Beatty finds the humanity in that gap.
A comedy swallowed by its legend
Ishtar’s reputation has long overshadowed the film itself. Shot on location in Morocco, with a large budget and a troubled production, it became a byword for Hollywood excess before most audiences had seen it. Stories about its cost, its delays, and its clashes between May and the studio circulated widely, and when the film finally opened, it was judged as a scandal rather than as a comedy. Beatty, who had produced and championed the project, found himself defending a film that many critics had already decided to dislike. That context matters, because it explains why a gentle, oddball comedy came to be treated as a catastrophe.
Seen without that baggage, Lyle Rogers is a rewarding comic creation. Beatty’s chemistry with Hoffman is the film’s greatest asset. The two men play off each other with the ease of a double act that has been together for years: Hoffman fussy and anxious, Beatty relaxed and deluded, both of them convinced that the next gig will change everything. Their scenes in the desert, as they stumble into a plot involving a blind camel, a map, and rival agents, have a shambling, improvisational energy. May allows scenes to run long, and Beatty is happy to let a joke develop slowly, trusting that the audience will stay with Lyle’s optimism even as his situation grows more absurd.
The spy plot that nobody follows
The film’s second half, in which Lyle and Chuck are recruited, more or less by accident, into a struggle over Middle Eastern politics, is deliberately confusing. May seems less interested in a coherent thriller than in watching two innocent Americans try to make sense of a world they do not understand. Lyle responds to danger with the same tools he uses on stage: a smile, a song, and an assumption that people will like him if he tries hard enough. Beatty plays those scenes without winking at the audience. He commits to Lyle’s innocence, and that commitment keeps the film from becoming cruel. We laugh at Lyle, but we also root for him, because he never becomes cynical, even when cynicism would be the sensible response.
That innocence connects Ishtar to Beatty’s earlier work. Like Joe Pendleton in Heaven Can Wait, Lyle is a decent man in an indecent situation. Unlike Joe, however, Lyle is not particularly talented, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Its comedy comes from the distance between Lyle’s self-image and the world’s indifference to it. Beatty, a star famous for his charm and control, was willing to play a man with neither, and to let the audience see him fail, repeatedly, in public. That willingness is braver than it first appears, and it gives Ishtar a sweetness that its reputation denies.
Reassessment and cult affection
In recent years, Ishtar has undergone a modest reassessment. Critics and audiences who encounter it without the burden of its production stories often find a funny, strange, and genuinely original comedy, with two major stars working against type and a director, Elaine May, whose comic sensibility was ahead of its time. The songs have become cult favourites, quoted and performed by fans who appreciate their precise, affectionate parody of lounge songwriting. Beatty’s Lyle, in particular, has been praised for its lightness. After the weight of Reds, he chose to play a man with no weight at all, and the contrast is refreshing.
Lyle Rogers may not be Beatty’s most famous role, but it is one of his most revealing. It shows a star willing to risk his image on a difficult comedy, to share the screen generously with another great actor, and to trust a director whose vision was not easily summarised in a trailer. Ishtar did not succeed commercially, and Beatty’s career became more sporadic afterwards, but the film’s failure says more about Hollywood’s appetite for stories than about its quality. Lyle, strumming his guitar in a Moroccan market, still believing that the next song will be the one, remains a touching figure: a dreamer whose dream is small, stubborn, and entirely his own.
It is also worth remembering how generous Beatty is as a screen partner here. He never tries to outshine Hoffman, and he allows Lyle’s failures to be shared rather than solitary. Their duet scenes work because both men commit equally to the joke, and because May frames them as a team, even when the team is falling apart. That generosity, rare in star vehicles, is part of why the film rewards a second viewing.