If I haven't talked about Blake Edwards, Tony Curtis's career as a starlet, feminism and Wacky Races by the end of this post then something will have gone wrong. Please send a cake with a file in it, and some throat medicine as I am of course sick on this, my birthday.
We begin with the movie itself, which is a profoundly ambitious and apparently lesser known epic comedy about a great race between the incredibly handsome Great Leslie, played by Tony Curtis, and the dastardly and crooked Professor Fate as portrayed by Jack Lemmon, with arch-feminist press woman Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood) careening between the two in a bid to get the best story and secure her job against the background of the suffragette era. It is very much a cartoon-style movie years before they came into fashion and Professor Fate and his sidekick Max must surely be a direct inspiration for Dastardly and Muttley in Wacky Races. The whole movie is an incredible and inescapable precursor to that cartoon. The only major difference between Dastardly and Fate is that Fate got distracted from the race by someone else's scheme which Dick Dastardly would never do. Apart from that one aberration all the self-destructive trickery and madness is fully in evidence, including a maniacal laugh.
'The Great Race' was directed by Blake Edwards, who I adore not for any of the things you might guess, but for his work on the radio show 'Richard Diamond Private Detective' in the 1950s (freely available at the Internet Archive). His tenure on that show just smacks of comedic writing and directing skills beyond those of lesser mortals. He is the man who allows all the physical and slapstick comedy (I abhor the term 'slapstick') to function over an epic two and a half hours in this film and coordinates the impressive food fight and Western saloon brawl sequences to the point of being pitch perfect. He is the invisible fourth lead character (fifth or six if you count Peter Falk's Max and/or Keenan Wynne's Hezekiah). Edwards had experience with Lemmon in 'Days Of Wine And Roses' and Curtis in 'Operation Petticoat', which surely motivated the bravura casting of the 'Some Like It Hot' stars as living cartoons. I still haven't mentioned Maggie Dubois, which is troubling, but then she's a tough character.
While Lemmon hams it up to the ceiling, Tony Curtis plays Tony Curtis as the Great Leslie. This is really what he did most of the time back then, and it is only clear in hindsight that Tony Curtis had the career of a male starlet: He turned up looking handsome, and then mostly vanished before turning grey, only to turn up in a few tv shows and 'The Boston Strangler' in later years. He was very good at what he did, but what he did was to be Tony Curtis, which is a much narrower range than what Jack Lemmon or a much more similar star such as Cary Grant could do. It's really rather interesting but outside the scope of this post. Jack Lemmon plays to two extremely different caricature roles in this movie, leading into the one great problem of the film: The long and slow 'Prisoner of Zenda' spoof that dominates the last thirty minutes. There's nothing essentially wrong with this segment except that is differently paced and missing most of the great wacky aspects of the rest of the film. Lemmon and Falk are separated, for one thing, as are Wood and Curtis. Also, Lemmon's second role as Prince Friedrich is so large as to be annoying, and it has been so over my whole life. Intellectually I know it to be the way it is so as to differentiate his performances as Friedrich and Professor Fate but it is still hard. However, despite all the problems of the Zenda sequence, it does have an amazing sword fight and the greatest pie fight in movie history. I'm not joking, it really does have the greatest pie fight in cinema history, rendering Natalie Wood's scantiness totally irrelevant!
Oh, Natalie Wood, after a lot of thought I must concede you did a good job in this movie. The role of a strident and somewhat manipulative suffragette is an almost impossible one to portray while still remaining likeable. Consistently argumentative people are never likeable in films, which is a problem as female assertiveness in any kind of historical period movie requires that self-same quality. Wood manages to pull it off, only being genuinely and woefully annoying on perhaps two occasions. The cause is true, but difficult to do well, and difficult to do in especially in a comedic mode. Fortunately they have a whole subplot at the newspaper office to tackle it properly and funnily, which leaves Wood to be... Fascinating. I have an ongoing internal dialogue (or monologue if you prefer) on whether women can be funny in the same way as men, or should even try to be. In this Wood becomes funny by rising above it all, and doing so with some bizarre kind of sparky class that is very difficult to categorize. So, she does well, especially for someone who ends up with that many cream pies in the face.
In many ways this is a landmark movie that seems to have been forgotten, with magnificent music from Henry Mancini (who worked with Edwards a lot) and some spectacular production values and direction. The cars on the steadily shrinking ice floe sequence alone are wonderful, and when compounded with the brilliant designs are delightful. This is a highly recommended movie for those who can handle very long films without collapsing into the floor in an attention deficit slump, and can take an anomalous sequence and keep going into the sun. And, to be clear, it is funny.
O.
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