Push the button, Max!
A review requested by Kelleson, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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In making the 1965 megabudget epic The Great Race, director Blake Edwards had the avowed goal of making the most grand-scale, terrific, throw-it-all-at-the-screen funniest comedy in history. He failed to do so. But it's not altogether hard to see why he thought he might be able to pull it off. The first half of the '60s found Edwards at his absolute zenith as a pop culture force: the run of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The Pink Panther (1963), and A Shot in the Dark (1964) (with a brief stopover for the much lower-profile Experiment in Terror in 1962) gave him a murder's row of popular hits with a fair degree of critical esteem, all built on a shared bedrock of cosmopolitan sophistication, transmuted more in some cases than others. He was probably never before and never after quite in the exact right space to indulge himself in the belief that he could and should go all-in on a simply massive celebration of a mode of comic filmmaking that was already at that point more than thirty years in the rear-view mirror.
In the end, the film cost a simply ludicrous amount of money, the most ever spent on a comedy up to that point (not adjusted for inflation). It did well-enough at the box office, but its dizzying price tag meant that it still ended up in the red, and critics didn't have much use for it at all. And I cannot pretend this feels unjust. The Great Race certainly isn't the funniest comedy in history; I think you could mount an argument that, thanks to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, it's not even the funniest expensive movie about newfangled modes of transportation in the first decade of the 20th Century with a running time over two hours released in the summer of '65.
That all being said, the movie's impulses are sound. Whatever we want to say about Edwards's execution - the film plays to none of his strengths as a filmmaker - he and screenwriter Arthur A. Ross at least had excellent tastes in the films they wanted to steal from. The Great Race opens with a dedication to the iconic slapstick comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and it ends with a massive pie fight obviously designed to compete with the legendary climax of Laurel & Hardy's 1927 short The Battle of the Century (which at that time was mostly known only through that climax; the first reel was lost until the 1970s, and the remainder of the second reel was lost until 2015). It wants extremely badly to bring back classic Hollywood slapstick for a '60s audience - and presumably for all audiences thereafter, given that we're now almost twice as far away from The Great Race as it was from the films to which it was paying homage - and I love that it wants to do that. The thing is that Edwards really doesn't know how to go about doing this. In principle, we can say that he had already demonstrated his slapstick bonafides with A Shot in the Dark, the second film starring Peter Sellers as the pratfalling Inspector Clouseau. But there's a world of difference between how Sellers approached slapstick and how vaudeville-trained comedians did: there's a kind of slow-motion car crash approach that works in the Clouseau films when paired with Edwards easy, ambling directing. Apply that to the much noisier zaniness of The Great Race and it the results are more sludgy than anything - especially in that heavily-promoted pie fight finale, where even a shrilly wacky musical underscore with an incongruous honkytonk vibe provided by Henry Mancini can't actually sell the idea that what we're watching is fast-paced, not when there's such a clearly choreographed "this, and then this, and then this" rhythm to the flying pastry.
It's contemptibly easy to point at the film's 160-minute running time and say "no, not that", but the issue isn't just that The Great Race is 160 minutes long . They're 160 slow minutes. It's no longer than the shortest cut of the Ur-text of the '60s Megacomedy, 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but even in all of its own considerable bloat, I'd say that film still moves by faster; there's more packed into individual scenes, and just plain more of it. The Great Race has all the space to be an overstuffed water balloon of comic extravagance, but it's somehow pretty streamlined for a travelogue that crosses two-thirds of the globe. There are only four actors we really need to keep track of, playing roles modeled on the simple personalities of early silent melodramas, and the (possibly apocryphal) iconography of a square-jawed hero in white and a mustachioed villain in black. The hero is famed daredevil The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis), the villain is Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), the dogged suffragette who muscles her way into Leslie's life is Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood), and the villain's put-upon henchman is Maximilian Meen (Peter Falk). And if we want to add in Leslie's mechanic, Hezekiah Sturdy (Keenan Wynn), we're up to five, and all of the moving parts we have to cope with for the first two hours are in place.
The plot is based, extremely loosely, on a promotional stunt held by the automobile industry in 1908, staging a race from New York, westward across the North American continent, over the Pacific Ocean by boat (The Great Race makes things wackier by trapping our heroes and villains on an ice floe with a polar bear), and thence across Eurasia to Paris. Leslie, the decade's most beloved, upstanding, handsome, and moral hero, is a natural pick to drive one of the cars; Fate, who has made his life's goal to upstage Leslie at least once by performing a more impressive stunt than his nemesis, tags along. Maggie is there as a reporter, and romantic interest, and most dubiously, an attempt to gift the film with something that I am absolutely sure Edwards and Ross thought resembled contemporary Women's Lib attitude. Max is there to give us the incongruous sight of of an actor with Falk's inherent casual naturalism and tough presence being smashed through various physical gags.
The cast is, at the very least, quite game. Indeed, I might be tempted to say that I wish Lemmon was a bit less game; he's having an obviously great time playing an untethered melodramatic ham, and when the film randomly decide to spend its last quarter on a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda (another mainstay of '10s and '20s pop culture, with three different feature adaptations in those decades), he has an even greater time playing the foppish prince of a Ruritanian country with a world-class irritating laugh. It's a whole lot of Lemmon doing his broadest, shtickiest work ever, and I will admit that I find it tiring long before all is said and done. Curtis is tasked with a role whose whole thing is being bland and one-note, just a stoic, earnestly honorable sack of uncontroversial American manhood. He hits the note correctly, and at least in the early going, I found his slightly dazed expressions of sincerity funnier than Lemmon's goofier mugging; but it's not a performance that can sustain 160 minutes. Wood was having a horrible time on set and is overcompensating fiercely; she's so beaming and cheerful and agreeable that it feels like she's going to start swinging an axe at any moment. But it fits the square, corny genre riffing, anyway.
Anyway, the acting isn't really helping to make things funny, and neither is the film's absolute refusal to light any sort of fire under this. The film opens with no fewer than four consecutive variations on the exact same scene of Fate attempting to one-up Leslie, and ending up making a complete ass of himself and Max; it's cute enough, but each iteration lasts for several minutes, and all of them together give the feeling of a prologue that takes up the whole first at. The great race itself doesn't start until about 45 minutes into the film; the Pacific Ocean doesn't appear until well after the 90-minute mark. And then there's that whole Zenda thing at the end, where the film completely gives up on its plot altogether, and also mostly stops having jokes, except for Lemmon's purposefully off-putting feyness as the unlikable prince.
At least this much credit is due: if The Great Race flubs the "comedy" half of a comedy super-production, it's pretty good at the super-production half. Warner Bros. spent an altogether stupid amount of money on the film, and every bit of it shows up onscreen, mostly in the extremely fussy design of the leads' playfully garish costumes, the elaborate cars, and the general sense of a vaguely-remembered storybook version of the pre-WWI era. Some of the seams show - there's a lot of green-screening that probably looked a lot cooler in '65 than it does now - and the best sets are considerably backloaded, so we get a lot of time spent on generic-looking backlots. Once the action turns to its European fantasy kingdom, though, the indulge scope of the production starts to pay off, and while Edwards isn't a natural director of fancy costume drama spectacle, The Great Race still holds its own as a big '60s family epic. Indeed, having given Those Magnificent Men the edge as the funnier movie, I should allow that The Great Race feels rather more handsomely-produced. And to be clear, neither of them is exactly what I would like for at tribute to early cinema and the freewheeling comedy thereof. But the 1960s was a rough time for studio comedies; the requisite lightness required had a hard time surviving amidst all of the thick overproduction common in the decade. And in this respect, at least, we cannot say that The Great Race is any worse than an exemplar of its time.
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In making the 1965 megabudget epic The Great Race, director Blake Edwards had the avowed goal of making the most grand-scale, terrific, throw-it-all-at-the-screen funniest comedy in history. He failed to do so. But it's not altogether hard to see why he thought he might be able to pull it off. The first half of the '60s found Edwards at his absolute zenith as a pop culture force: the run of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The Pink Panther (1963), and A Shot in the Dark (1964) (with a brief stopover for the much lower-profile Experiment in Terror in 1962) gave him a murder's row of popular hits with a fair degree of critical esteem, all built on a shared bedrock of cosmopolitan sophistication, transmuted more in some cases than others. He was probably never before and never after quite in the exact right space to indulge himself in the belief that he could and should go all-in on a simply massive celebration of a mode of comic filmmaking that was already at that point more than thirty years in the rear-view mirror.
In the end, the film cost a simply ludicrous amount of money, the most ever spent on a comedy up to that point (not adjusted for inflation). It did well-enough at the box office, but its dizzying price tag meant that it still ended up in the red, and critics didn't have much use for it at all. And I cannot pretend this feels unjust. The Great Race certainly isn't the funniest comedy in history; I think you could mount an argument that, thanks to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, it's not even the funniest expensive movie about newfangled modes of transportation in the first decade of the 20th Century with a running time over two hours released in the summer of '65.
That all being said, the movie's impulses are sound. Whatever we want to say about Edwards's execution - the film plays to none of his strengths as a filmmaker - he and screenwriter Arthur A. Ross at least had excellent tastes in the films they wanted to steal from. The Great Race opens with a dedication to the iconic slapstick comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and it ends with a massive pie fight obviously designed to compete with the legendary climax of Laurel & Hardy's 1927 short The Battle of the Century (which at that time was mostly known only through that climax; the first reel was lost until the 1970s, and the remainder of the second reel was lost until 2015). It wants extremely badly to bring back classic Hollywood slapstick for a '60s audience - and presumably for all audiences thereafter, given that we're now almost twice as far away from The Great Race as it was from the films to which it was paying homage - and I love that it wants to do that. The thing is that Edwards really doesn't know how to go about doing this. In principle, we can say that he had already demonstrated his slapstick bonafides with A Shot in the Dark, the second film starring Peter Sellers as the pratfalling Inspector Clouseau. But there's a world of difference between how Sellers approached slapstick and how vaudeville-trained comedians did: there's a kind of slow-motion car crash approach that works in the Clouseau films when paired with Edwards easy, ambling directing. Apply that to the much noisier zaniness of The Great Race and it the results are more sludgy than anything - especially in that heavily-promoted pie fight finale, where even a shrilly wacky musical underscore with an incongruous honkytonk vibe provided by Henry Mancini can't actually sell the idea that what we're watching is fast-paced, not when there's such a clearly choreographed "this, and then this, and then this" rhythm to the flying pastry.
It's contemptibly easy to point at the film's 160-minute running time and say "no, not that", but the issue isn't just that The Great Race is 160 minutes long . They're 160 slow minutes. It's no longer than the shortest cut of the Ur-text of the '60s Megacomedy, 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but even in all of its own considerable bloat, I'd say that film still moves by faster; there's more packed into individual scenes, and just plain more of it. The Great Race has all the space to be an overstuffed water balloon of comic extravagance, but it's somehow pretty streamlined for a travelogue that crosses two-thirds of the globe. There are only four actors we really need to keep track of, playing roles modeled on the simple personalities of early silent melodramas, and the (possibly apocryphal) iconography of a square-jawed hero in white and a mustachioed villain in black. The hero is famed daredevil The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis), the villain is Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), the dogged suffragette who muscles her way into Leslie's life is Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood), and the villain's put-upon henchman is Maximilian Meen (Peter Falk). And if we want to add in Leslie's mechanic, Hezekiah Sturdy (Keenan Wynn), we're up to five, and all of the moving parts we have to cope with for the first two hours are in place.
The plot is based, extremely loosely, on a promotional stunt held by the automobile industry in 1908, staging a race from New York, westward across the North American continent, over the Pacific Ocean by boat (The Great Race makes things wackier by trapping our heroes and villains on an ice floe with a polar bear), and thence across Eurasia to Paris. Leslie, the decade's most beloved, upstanding, handsome, and moral hero, is a natural pick to drive one of the cars; Fate, who has made his life's goal to upstage Leslie at least once by performing a more impressive stunt than his nemesis, tags along. Maggie is there as a reporter, and romantic interest, and most dubiously, an attempt to gift the film with something that I am absolutely sure Edwards and Ross thought resembled contemporary Women's Lib attitude. Max is there to give us the incongruous sight of of an actor with Falk's inherent casual naturalism and tough presence being smashed through various physical gags.
The cast is, at the very least, quite game. Indeed, I might be tempted to say that I wish Lemmon was a bit less game; he's having an obviously great time playing an untethered melodramatic ham, and when the film randomly decide to spend its last quarter on a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda (another mainstay of '10s and '20s pop culture, with three different feature adaptations in those decades), he has an even greater time playing the foppish prince of a Ruritanian country with a world-class irritating laugh. It's a whole lot of Lemmon doing his broadest, shtickiest work ever, and I will admit that I find it tiring long before all is said and done. Curtis is tasked with a role whose whole thing is being bland and one-note, just a stoic, earnestly honorable sack of uncontroversial American manhood. He hits the note correctly, and at least in the early going, I found his slightly dazed expressions of sincerity funnier than Lemmon's goofier mugging; but it's not a performance that can sustain 160 minutes. Wood was having a horrible time on set and is overcompensating fiercely; she's so beaming and cheerful and agreeable that it feels like she's going to start swinging an axe at any moment. But it fits the square, corny genre riffing, anyway.
Anyway, the acting isn't really helping to make things funny, and neither is the film's absolute refusal to light any sort of fire under this. The film opens with no fewer than four consecutive variations on the exact same scene of Fate attempting to one-up Leslie, and ending up making a complete ass of himself and Max; it's cute enough, but each iteration lasts for several minutes, and all of them together give the feeling of a prologue that takes up the whole first at. The great race itself doesn't start until about 45 minutes into the film; the Pacific Ocean doesn't appear until well after the 90-minute mark. And then there's that whole Zenda thing at the end, where the film completely gives up on its plot altogether, and also mostly stops having jokes, except for Lemmon's purposefully off-putting feyness as the unlikable prince.
At least this much credit is due: if The Great Race flubs the "comedy" half of a comedy super-production, it's pretty good at the super-production half. Warner Bros. spent an altogether stupid amount of money on the film, and every bit of it shows up onscreen, mostly in the extremely fussy design of the leads' playfully garish costumes, the elaborate cars, and the general sense of a vaguely-remembered storybook version of the pre-WWI era. Some of the seams show - there's a lot of green-screening that probably looked a lot cooler in '65 than it does now - and the best sets are considerably backloaded, so we get a lot of time spent on generic-looking backlots. Once the action turns to its European fantasy kingdom, though, the indulge scope of the production starts to pay off, and while Edwards isn't a natural director of fancy costume drama spectacle, The Great Race still holds its own as a big '60s family epic. Indeed, having given Those Magnificent Men the edge as the funnier movie, I should allow that The Great Race feels rather more handsomely-produced. And to be clear, neither of them is exactly what I would like for at tribute to early cinema and the freewheeling comedy thereof. But the 1960s was a rough time for studio comedies; the requisite lightness required had a hard time surviving amidst all of the thick overproduction common in the decade. And in this respect, at least, we cannot say that The Great Race is any worse than an exemplar of its time.
