Watch: 5-Minute Tribute To The Films Of The Great Hal Ashby

While I’ve personally never been the biggest fan of director Hal Ashby – the renegade humanist whose birthday just passed – I’ll be the first to admit that his impact and relevance on cinema as a whole is undeniable. After all these years, Ashby remains one of the last true quintessential Hollywood outsiders: an icon of the counter-culture who, though he may never have achieved the near-universal recognition of New Hollywood peers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, is nevertheless a symbol for a certain kind of idiosyncratic and deeply-personal filmmaking.

His best pictures, such as the bristling, poetically profane “The Last Detail” or his great Warren Beatty movie “Shampoo” – in this writer’s opinion, the director’s most soulful and accessible film – radiate a sort of wounded compassion for their screwed-up characters. Ashby also had a great gallows sense of humor that he would deftly deploy to offset the pathos and whimsy of many of his films, and though he was most...