1959 - OPERATION PETTICOAT, a World War II submarine comedy

Cary Grant's production company is behind this sort of kind of funny service comedy. Supposed comedy master Blake Edwards was hired to direct.   The then hot Tony Curtis was cast as one of Cary Grant's officers.  Operation Petticoat is set aboard a submarine called the Sea Tiger during World War II. 

After being damaged from a Japanese attack, Curtis plays that standard military character of the "scrounger" a guy who can lay his hands on parts legally or illegally that will get the Sea Tiger back into service.  After 30 minutes of this stealing the parts comedy stuff, the Sea Tiger finally goes to sea.  However on their first mission they end up rescuing a group of Navy nurses.  From this point on until the end of the film we get lots of mildly smutty sex jokes as the men of the Sea Tiger have to deal with buxom nurses squeezing their bosoms around the tight hallways of the submarine.  There are also lots of bra jokes as if sailors had never seen bras before.

Well the film was a big commercial hit when released but I would say it really hasn't stood the test of time. Blake Edwards has loaded the film up with his usual slapstick humor which doesn't really work all that well, most of the time it doesn't work at all.  The camera leering on the bottoms and chests of the nurses is kind of in poor taste. You just want to say I get it, breast jokes are sort of funny especially lots of them.

 

Cary Grant as usual brings his comedy timing and professionalism to the role of the captain.  Tony Curtis is the wheeler dealer lover boy and I guess he's alright.  Someone was smart enough to cast some decent character actors for the film.  Gene Evans, Arthur O'Connell, Virginia Gregg and Gavin McLeod are fun to watch.  The nurses are the usual bunch of Hollywood starlets as they like to say, Joan O'Brien, Madlyn Rhue, Dina Merrill and Marion Ross bring their shall we say "assets" to the film.

 

The film was written by a couple of comedy veterans, Stanley Shapiro  who specialized in early 60's sex comedies like Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back.  Shapiro shares a screen writing credit with Maurice Richlin who wrote silly sex comedies as well.  This film actually was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.  However Shapiro and Richlin won that year for another inane comedy the Doris Day, Rock Hudson movie Pillow Talk.  Interestingly enough Cary Grant was in one of Alfred Hitchcock's best films the same year as this piece of junk,  North By Northwest which won no Academy Awards.  Well that's showbiz I guess.

The film runs a whooping 124 minutes for what is essentially a very light weight comedy.

1965 - THE GREAT RACE, should have been called "The Barely Okay Race."

The director Blake Edwards had been on a roll with his successful Pink Panther films.  Edwards was considered one of the masters of screen comedy particularly when it came to slapstick humor.  Warner Brothers studios gave him a lot of money to film a tribute to the kind of physical comedy he was supposed to be an expert at.  The result was a critical and commercial flop.

Tony Curtis is "The Great Leslie," a virtuous hero always dressed in white.  His opponent is Jack Lemmon  the evil "Professor Fate," Leslie's mortal enemy.  Natalie Wood is "Maggie DuBois," a reporter and suffragette.  The film is set in the early 20th century, with Leslie and Professor Fate challenging each other to a round the world car race in early automobiles.  This setup allows Blake Edwards to load the film up with lots of gags that he probably borrowed from silent comedies.

However the film is just not that funny.  The viewer sits through one lame comedic bit after another.  The old time comics like Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd knew how to set up and pace a joke.  Edwards knows how to reuse a lot of their old situations but doesn't seem to be able to get the timing right to delivery the laughs.  This is particularly evident during an extended pie fight scene which should be hilarious but for the most part just lays there like a dying fish.

Another big issue with the film is Jack Lemmon.  Lemmon is supposed to be in the great tradition of the evil mustache twirling villain, sort of like Snidley Whiplash from the old Dudley Do Right cartoons.  But the best Lemmon can do is shout and role his eyes without actually being funny.  It's hard to believe that Lemmon was considered a gifted comedian at one time.

 

The film is supposed to be about a race but with an hour left to go in an already long film, Edwards decides to borrow the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda.  The race is completely forgotten about as the viewer watches scenes rehashed that were staged a whole lot better in the original Prisoner of Zenda film.  

To sum it up the film is almost a complete failure and kind of a mess.  To bad since this is a large scale and good looking production.  The actors with the exception of Jack Lemmon are good, the on-location photography across Europe must have been expensive, but the film's biggest issue the unfunny script finishes off the whatever fun there is to be had in watching this expensive disappointment.

 

The film was written by Arthur A. Ross with Blake Edwards taking a story credit.  For a comedy the film runs 160 minutes.

1989 - PETER GUNN, at first you don't suceed try again.

This is the pilot for a revival of the old Peter Gunn TV series from the late 1950's.  The writer/director Blake Edwards had gone to this well once before with a movie version of his old series called Gunn, with very mixed results.  Here Edwards plan was to revive the series for a 1980's audience

Peter Strauss takes up the role of Peter Gunn, Barbara Williams is his girlfriend/mistress Edie Hart.  Peter Jurasik is Peter Gunn's friend Lt. Jacoby who is basically in the story to provide Gunn with information that will move the plot along.  Edwards also cast his daughter Jennifer Edwards as Peter Gunn's ditsy secretary in a lot of pointless and rather tiresome attempts at humor.

If Edwards had cribbed a lot of his plot for the Gunn movie from his TV series, in this version he actually uses scenes from the Gunn movie in this TV pilot, this is getting a little confusing.

 

Peter Strauss is actually pretty good as Peter Gunn, Barbara Williams does the smoldering girlfriend part about as well as can be expected.  The plot is the old corrupt cops story line with Peter Gunn sorting out who is killing who. 

 I'll give Edwards credit in this version of Peter Gunn he went back to the original series's 1950's setting.  He also loaded enough action to keep the viewer watching.  However ABC decided not to pick up the pilot for a TV series.  There have been no more versions of Peter Gunn since.

The running time for this film is 90 minutes.

1967 - GUNN, attempt to revive an old TV show

The writer and director Blake Edwards decided to bring his Peter Gunn character back from the late 1950's TV graveyard with very mixed results.  Craig Stevens who had played private detective Peter Gunn was as one critic called him the poor man's Cary Grant.  Several of the characters from the original television show notably Herschel Bernardi and Lola Albright didn't return.  In the case of Albright, she was deemed to old to play Peter Gunn's girlfriend.

Blake Edwards mostly known for his comedies had pretty good luck with his noir film Experiment In Terror so tacking a private eye mystery shouldn't have been to hard for him.  However the film is very lazy.  Edwards clearly cribbed a lot of plot points and situations from his old series.  Edwards fascination with cross dressing also shows up in the film.  Edwards was clearly going for a noir feel to Gunn.  Many scenes are filmed at night and with everyone running around in dark suits, at times it's difficult to tell exactly what's going on.

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Gunn is an OK time killer from a director who is coasting with this picture.  Perhaps there was an interesting idea for a film rolling around here, maybe something like having a 1950's character trying to adapt to the changing 1960's.  But clearly this wasn't explored.

 

Henry Mancini as usual provided the score for this film, he can be seen performing at a piano in a nightclub scene.

The film was written by Blake Edwards and William Peter Blatty, the running time is 93 minutes.

1968 - THE PARTY, the non Pink Panther movie

One of the better Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers slapstick films.  Peter Sellers plays an Indian actor making a Gunga Din type of film.  Sellers is in brown makeup and his character is offensive but he is good at it, he was always a great mimic.  Sellers gets invited to a big Hollywood party at a producer's home, and the usual slapstick comedic stuff happens in a Blake Edwards film.

This film was apparently largely improvised with the director of photography Lucien Ballard simultaneously videotaping and shooting The Party on film so they could decide on set what was working and what wasn't.

The Party also starts a French performer named Claudine Longet.  Longet was married to Andy Williams and he usually had her on his television show where she would sing some sort of melancholy ballad looking doe eyed and very bummed out.  She made a mess out of her life after she divorced Williams  The perfect French waif.

Anyway, if you like slapstick The Party isn't too bad, and some of it is actually funny for a Blake Edwards film.  Henry Mancini wrote the score.

99 minutes, written by Blake Edwards, Tom Waldman and Frank Waldman.

1988 - SUNSET, supposed Hollywood comedy is not really a comedy, actually not really anything.

Sunset was a film sold as a comedy from writer/director Blake Edwards which starred Bruce Wlllis and James Garner.  The film is not funny, it's actually kind of an episode of Edward's old Peter Gunn detective series padded out. 

The film is about the supposed friendship between silent screen cowboy star Tom Mix (whose life would probably make a more interesting film) and Wyatt Earp.  Mix and Earp become involved in a murder mystery in old Hollywood.  Garner's OK as Wyatt Earp, Bruce Willis smirks his way through another film.

For some reason Blake Edwards got himself the reputation as a comedic auteur mostly because he wrote and directed his own films.  Edwards was a pretty mediocre filmmaker who fancied himself some sort of keeper of the traditional comedy heritage of Hollywood.  What this mostly translated into was a lot of bad films with a lot of bad slapstick in them,  his Pink Panther films can be a major ordeal to sit through.

For some other reason,  Blake Edwards the supposed admirer of old Hollywood comedians, has a Charlie Chaplin like figure as his bad guy.  He's played by Malcolm McDowell who usually specializes in sadists and killers, nothing to subtle there.  I'm not sure what Charlie Chaplin did to deserve this kind of treatment.  Edwards based his career around cribbing old routines from silent comedians like Chaplin.   

A real oddball of a film.

103 minutes.