Not that there’s a whole lot to spoil. More or less based on some elements from Edwards’s personal life and professional life in the business. Recently shown on TCM. Anyway. . .
I saw this when it first came out, and while I remembered the basic plot, such that it is, I hadn’t remembered a lot of the scenes. One of the first is a man, presumably an actor, jogging down the beach with his dog. As he’s running, he has a heart attack and ends up croaking. No one has noticed.
Several times during the movie it cuts to the ever-faithful dog, staying put the location where his owner fell. No interaction with the dog or the departed with any of the other actors. At the end of the, a different person (a director) has croaked and his friends give him a so-called Viking funeral, setting a boat aflame with his body in it. The scene cuts to the dog watching the smoke rising in the distance at which point it wags its tail. The final scene shows the dog, still waiting at the beach, presumably for his owner to wake up and either continue the run or go home.
I’d invite any interpretations of what this motif might mean, if anything. I found a post that was supposed to be from an interview with Edwards said that he had attempted suicide, but his dog pretty much interfered and interrupted him, so that might be something.
MAD’s treatment of it had one guy saying, “The studio figured they could recoup their expenses if they showed Julie Andrews topless.” Another man says, “If they showed Dolly Parton topless, it could pay off the national debt.”
Yeah, I remember S.O.B. also, and I still don’t know what Blake Edwards was trying to do. Oh, I get it partially—big-money musicals weren’t doing well, so let’s make a big money musical movie where Mary Poppins takes off her top.
The dog story added little. Airplane! was better at stitching the start and the end, through the Robert Hays’ taxi passenger at the end of the movie, saying, “I’ll give him twenty more minutes, and that’s it” at the end. The dog story does nothing to equal that.
The First Nudie Musical (1976) did it first and did it better. Nice girl Cindy Williams (Shirley Feeney of “Laverne and Shirley” and shy Laurie of American Graffiti) calling for a “stunt cock” is hilarious. S.O.B., with Julie Andrews baring her top is meh.
The way I remember it is that the dog’s dead owner is discovered and carted off near the end of the film and the principles discover the body (who they recognize as a forgotten character actor) in the funeral home and place it in the director friend’s casket when they steal his -the director’s - body for the Viking funeral. The dog remains on the beach until it sees the smoke from the funeral boat, wags its tail, and walks away.