To BE Or Not To BE

Blake Edwards has died.  He was maybe the preeminent comedy director of his era.  For years I would claim he symbolized the fall of comedy--30s: Lubitsch, 40s: Sturges, 50s: Wilder, 60s: Blake Edwards.  But that's a little unfair.  Perhaps he wasn't the equal of earlier giants, but he held up a tradition that was going through hard times.  (Not that all he did was comedy.  Just his most memorable stuff.)

He started as a scriptwriter and became big in TV, as a writer and director, in the 50s. He started directing films and by the end of the decade was a major figure in movies.  Operation Petticoat, starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, was one of the biggest hits of 1959.  I don't love it--compare it to Grant and Curtis films from the same year, North By Northwest and Some Like It Hot--but it's harmless fun.

In 1961, he made the romantic comedy Breakfast At Tiffany's, with an iconic performance from Audrey Hepburn.  I don't consider it a classic (as some do), but it shows a certain imagination, and I particularly enjoy the sight gags at the big party scene.

In 1962, he tried a couple different things--Experiment In Terror, a not entirely successful attempt at a crime film, and Days Of Wine And Roses, featuring one of Jack Lemmon's best dramatic performances.

Then in 1963 came the film that would shape Edwards' career, The Pink Panther.  It threatens to be just another continental jewel thief flick, but one character--Peter Sellers' bumbling Inspector Clouseau--would overshadow the rest and start a series of Pink Panther films (though the Panther of the title wasn't about Clouseau, any more than the Thin Man refers to William Powell).  Sellers wasn't even top-billed, and his character isn't fully there--he's almost a normal, rational cop at this point--but there was a comic spark that couldn't be contained.  Sellers was already well known in England, but the Pink Panther films made him an international star.  "The Pink Panther Theme," composed by Edwards regular Henry Mancini, also helped.

So they're planning to make a film of the Broadway hit A Shot In The Dark (which featured Julie Harris, Walter Matthau and William Shatner).  Edwards comes aboard, starts working on the script, and figures hey, this'll work for that popular Clouseau character.  So even though it really has nothing to do with him, Edwards completely rewrites the story, Sellers repeats his role, this time as the lead, Mancini writes another great theme, and Edwards has another hit.  It also helped establish his slapstick style, which would often be done at a fairly deliberate pace (he was influenced by Laurel and Hardy, and even made a film in 1986, A Fine Mess, directly inspired by them), and show things by implication--something would happen, but we would only see the aftermath.



In 1965, Edwards, following in the tradition of films like Around The World In 80 Days, made The Great Race, which features lots of scenery and plenty of actors.  I like this film, though it's a bit too long (especially the Prisoner Of Zenda parody).  However, the critics didn't go for it, and it cost so much it didn't make back its money.  This was the beginning of a series of Edwards films over the next decade that didn't do too well.  Maybe the most interesting of these was The Party (1968), another Peter Sellers comedy (even though Sellers was hard to work with), that was no hit but has since achieved cult status.  The idea is simplicity itself.  Sellers is a naive Indian actor who mistakenly gets invited to an expensive Hollywood party which he proceeds to destroy through a series of slapstick misadventures.  Most of the story is set at the fancy house where the party takes place, and much of the action was improvised.  I find the film a bit too claustrophobic, and not inventive enough, but it's still worth watching.

So had the zeitgeist changed, and left Edwards behind?  Whether or not, he retreated, as did Peter Sellers, and in 1975 made The Return Of The Pink Panther. (Alan Arkin had starred as Inspector Clouseau in a film of the same name in 1968, directed by Bud Yorkin, but that went nowhere.)  It was a hit.  They made The Pink Panther Strikes Again in 1976 and Revenge Of The Pink Panther in 1978.  Edwards and Sellers were bigger than ever.  Some see these later Panther films as weaker than the 60s version, but, while they're different in style, I think they hold up.  In particular, The Pink Panther Strikes Again has some of the best slapstick sequences Edwards and Sellers ever did.

Edwards was on a roll, and in 1979 created 10, which made Dudley Moore a star, turned cornrowed Bo Derek into a sex symbol and revived interest in Ravel's music. Edwards was once again leading the zeitgeist.

He followed up in 1981 with a bitter comedy about Hollywood, S.O.B.  Richard Mulligan plays a Hollywood director (stand-in for Edwards?) whose latest film is a flop.  He hopes to make it work by adding more explicit sex.  S.O.B. wasn't a hit, but is memorable, if for nothing else, in that a central plot point had Julie Andrews (Edwards' wife), who played a character vaguely based on herself, show her breasts.  The plot is cynical--that new Hollywood is all about sex.  But Edwards was wrong.  Baring Andrews' breasts is supposed to make the film within the film a hit, but the real-world audience didn't care.  Sometimes you get the feeling in his later films that Edwards injects sex into his work because he can--or because he's a dirty old man.  Anyway, haven't seen this films in years, and think it's time for another look.

In between making new Pink Panther films (though Sellers had died), Edwards made another fine farce, Victor Victoria.  Julie Andrews (unconvincingly) plays a woman playing a man playing a woman in 1930s Paris.  There's charm in the setting and costumes, and a nice cast, including James Garner, Robert Preston, Alex Karras and especially Lesley Anne Warren.  The comic complications work pretty well, though there are too many lengthy musical numbers, making the film well over two hours.

Edwards, now in his 60s, made ten more films, none of them of much interest.  They weren't all bad, though none were well-reviewed and none were significant hits.  I'll give him credit for Skin Deep (1989), though, where he had a scene...well, rather than describe it, why not show it to you:



Edwards may not have been a first-tier director or screenwriter, but he did enough good work--some of it iconic--that he deserves to be remembered as a major name.