I watched The Great Race over the past couple of days. I’d seen bits and pieces of it, but never watched the whole things, for reasons I’ll get to below.
The film is impressively made – Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Keenan Wynn, Ross Martin, Larry Storch, Arthur O’Connell, Dorothy Provine, Denver Pyle Vivian Vance (!! How many movies have Vivian Vance in them?). An original son by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. Animated title cards. The disc had an Overture, an Intermezzo, and Exit music. Helluva long film, too.
The film is apparently the favorite of a lot of peopled. MST3K got their catchphrase “Push the button, Frank!” from this film’s “Push the button, Max!” But I found it …disappointing. You really want to have a good time with something this much time and effort went into, but it feels like it’s straining awgfully hard to be good and failing. Jack Lemmon plsys the stereotyped Victorian-era villain Doctor Fate, in curled moustache and top hat and all dressed in black. A very pre-Columbo Peter Falk plays his sidekick, Max. Falk doesn’t look quite the way I remember him. He’s too young, and looks as if he hasn’t ripened yet. Lemmon’s Professor Fate is the dastardly, clever, but incompetent villain who paints all his evil devices black with red trim and with a skull and crossbones, and who plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on his organ in his castle-like lair. You think that at some point he ought to be tying a Damsel in Distress to a log in a sawmill or to a set of railroad tracks, but he never does.
Tony Curtis plays The Great Leslie, a daredevil and escape artist. The film opens with him escaping from a straitjacket suspended from a balloon, as if he’d never left the set of Houdini. He’s always dressed in white and later drives a spotless white car. His hair is never mussed. Natalie Wood plays Maggie Dubois, liberated female reporter a la Nellie Bly, but who loses her top layer of clothes more often. She’s Curtis’ love interest, although apparently she and Curtis hated each other. They’d been in two films together before this, one just the previous year – Sex and the Single Girl – in which their characters were romantically linked. She had to be persuaded to make this film, which she did in exchange for being allowed to star in Inside Daisy Clover. She made the film, which flopped, although it’s apparently gained a cult following (Weird trivia – Wood sang in both films. Or, rather, her character did. As in West Side Story and Gypsy, her singing was dubbed.)
The story is inspired by an actual New York to Paris road race (and probably by Bly’s own Round the World trip, i n which she sought to beat Phileas Fogg, and succeeded), but uses that only as an excuse for hanging location scenes on. The characters are diverted from the race by a brawl in a Western town, being trapped in the North by a storm and an iceberg, and by Ruritanian hijinks in a made-up Eastern European Ruritania where, for no really good reason (except to advance the plot), the ruler looks exactly like Professor Fate. Jack Lemmon overacts even more outrageously as Prince Hapnik than as Professor Fate, and is equally unfunny in both roles. He gets no screen credit for playing Hapnick.
This lastter section gives an excuse for Tony Curtis to indulge in swordplay with Ross Martin with both epee and sabre. The sword choreography looks pretty good. Martin plays a character named “Baron Wolf von Stuppe” almost a decade before Madeline Kahn played “Lili Von Shtupp” in *Blazing Saddles, proving that Mel Brooks had nothing on Blake Edwards.
The Ruritanian segment also has what was billed as “the world’s greatest pie fight”. This might be the whole reason Edwards made the film. He was reportedly a big fan of silent slapstick comedy, and dedicated the film “To Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy”. The pie fight might be an homage to their 1927 film The Battle of the Century, which reportedly used 10,000 cream pies. There were other pie fight silent films, though.
Edwards didn’t use cream pies, as Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges did – he used real fruit pies. By all accounts, real pies hurt when they hit you. It took five days to film, and the pies started to go bad during this time, making the smell awful. Reportedly filming was fun, at first, but people started getting disgusted (and hurt). When, after it was over, the cast pelted Edwards with pies, it might have been in retaliation.
I’m lad I finally saw it, but I didn’t find it really funny. One reason I never watched it before was that I found it overly “camp” and obvious and unfunny. “Camp” was becoming a big thing in popular entertainment in the mid 1960s, and Hollywood evidently thought people wanted more of it. But I loathed it. I hated TV series like Lost in Space and Batman that played up the campy elements. I wanted my science fiction “straight”, and preferred Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and Star Trek, when it finally came out. Batman, too, had been better in the comic books. The 1950s incarnation is remembered by many as the era of alien bad guys and Bat Mite, but it was also a period in which many stories depicted Batman as detective, and emphasized his deductive skills and his use of reasoning and arcane knowledge in ferreting out very real human foes. It was also the era of the New Look Batman, introduced by Carmine Infantino in 1964, when they modernized the character, giving him a sporty new faster Batmobile and getting rid of the fantastic elements, just in time for the TV version to jettison all that, giving us the Bat Phone and Aunt Harriet. It was a decade before the comic book Batman got serious again. I would’ve loved a modern superhero movie, a la the MCU, but, instead, we got the extremely campy 1966 Batman movie. The kind of movies I wanted wouldn’t come around until good CGI did.
I might have gone for a light, good-humored but non-campy Great Race, too. Or at least one that was genuinely funny. But Blake Edwards’ film looked as if it was trying to hard and not coming close to succeeding.
