BEFORE: Nearly at the end of the Doc Block now, just one more after this one, then I can finally get to something fictional this weekend. Of course, I cheated, I've been out to the theaters twice to see "Superman" and "Fantastic Four", because hello, big comic book fan here, and I need to keep up on the latest. I will get to one of those reviews very shortly, the other will have to wait.
Initially this was going to be the final film in this year's Doc Block, you can see it shares three actors with "Faye", this year's kick-off film, because originally the Block was designed as a big circle, so I could enter into it from any point and thus have some control over what the final film would be. I think I handled this properly, because once I flipped this with tomorrow's film, it gave me so many good options, and the rest of August just kind of fell into place after that, and I got to pick movies that I wanted to see, which is kind of the whole point, really.
This film aired as part of the "American Masters" series on PBS, and I've learned to keep a close eye on what they're airing, both the newer episodes and also which ones from previous seasons they might be airing during Pledge Week. (That means editing out the pledge breaks, but, you know, whatever it takes.). I guess that PBS (or CPB) also keeps an eye out for docs about filmmaking, musicians and artists and either licenses those docs for airing or perhaps just buys them outright, I don't know how all that distribution stuff works. Thirty-plus years working in independent film, and honestly distribution remains a mysterious shrouded process, and I know who I blame for that. But anyway, this year I included several docs that aired as part of "American Masters", including "Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story", "Groucho & Cavett", and "Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse".
I don't know if I could put together another Doc Block without the assistance of shows like "American Masters" - but the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is quite visibly being de-funded by our commander in chief, aka the Orange Nightmare, so whether PBS can continue to bring me (and you) quality programming is now very questionable. I donated some money a year or two ago when they aired that Tom Lehrer concert he did in Sweden, just to get a DVD of that show, but I should probably make another contribution soon, as I just recorded the documentary on Roberta Flack from "American Masters". Whatever maintains my access to more material, I should do.
Robert Wagner carries over from "Biggest Heist Ever".
THE PLOT: Explores the story of director, screenwriter and producer Blake Edwards, known for cinema classics such as "Breakfast at Tiffany's", the "Pink Panther" series and "10", also his marriage with Julie Andrews.
AFTER: Unknowingly, Blake Edwards played a big part in establishing this blog in the first place, 17 years ago. I'd been recording films off of TCM for a few years and burning them to DVD, and I figured that process would take a little while, but eventually I'd have a copy of every film I ever wanted or needed and then a little part of my life would feel complete. Yeah, that feeling of fulfillment never happened, because it turns out there are new films every year, every week even, and some processes are just never, ever going to end. But part of that initial process back in 2004-2009 was getting all of the "Pink Panther" films on DVD. Once I had that series (and also the old "Planet of the Apes" movies) I figured, time to watch them all, but in the proper order. It seemed like every time I tuned in to a "Pink Panther" movie, it was always "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" - but suddenly I had the opportunity to watch every film from the beginning and figure out which ones were the better ones. Hmm, what other insights could I gain from watching films in the proper order? And that was the inspiration, but look how much time I've wasted on sorting and indexing movies as a result, in some vain attempt to make some sense of it all. It became like cataloguing stars in the universe, you hope that you're making some form of progress, but deep down you also know that you'll never be done.
Thematically, I've not kind of circled back to where I began this year, movie-making. This happened last year as well, where the first film was "Sly" and the last film was "Call Me Kate", and those two films were also linked, for some reason "Sly" had footage of "The Lion in Winter" with Katharine Hepburn, which, you know, shouldn't make any sense, but that's where we find ourselves. I picked the right place to split up the circle, because nobody would believe me if I pointed out that Stallone is a big fan of Peter O'Toole, because they would seem to be on opposite ends of the acting spectrum. In the same way, I don't think Blake Edwards ever worked with Faye Dunaway, however it's a little easier this time to believe in the connective tissue between their movies.
In a similar way, it might be hard at first to comprehend the relationship between Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews - she was a serious actress, known for playing the uptight nanny Mary Poppins and the repressed former nun Maria von Trapp, while he was known for slapstick comedies like "The Great Race" and "The Pink Panther", but when you learn how they met, two divorced people stuck in traffic, one going to their analyst and the other returning from theirs, there really can't be a more L.A.-based meet-cute, can there? And if you think about the fact that he directed "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with Audrey Hepburn, who also starred in "My Fair Lady", which began as a Broadway musical that starred Julie Andrews, perhaps it was inevitable that these two would get together at some point.
But I recall that the "Pink Panther" movies were considered high comedy in my parent's house, they were shown pretty often on the weekend movie blocks on the three UHF stations in the Boston area, I think. This was years before streaming or even VHS tapes were a thing, so there weren't a lot of choices, you kind of watched whatever movies were on TV. Also my father never took us out to the movies because he believed that sooner or later, every movie would be on TV. I had to buy him cable TV when he retired because he still refused to pay for TV - then a year or two later they got rid of all antenna-based broadcasting and everything was cable, so I'm glad I got him switched over before he had to be.
My mom, meanwhile, was the big Rodgers & Hammerstein fan, so we were forced to watch "The Sound of Music" just about once a year, I think when VHS tapes came out that was the first one we bought her, so she could watch it any time, but then of course when you can watch a movie any time, you rarely do. Probably she just waited for it to be on TV again and then sat there and watched it, but with commercials it was nearly four hours long! I don't think any of us knew behind the scenes that the lead actress from "The Sound of Music" was in a relationship with the director of the "Pink Panther" movies, but then when Julie Andrews appeared topless in the movie "S.O.B." I guess everybody figured it out. Needless to say, my mother was super-shocked about this, but once I was old enough to rent movies, I made sure to check it out. I don't think I understood much of anything that took place in that movie, so I probably just fast-forwarded to the scene in question.
What I failed to understand back then was that Blake Edwards put himself in all of his movies, or at least a version of himself, played by other people. There's a great resemblance to Woody Allen's filmography if you think about it - Woody played versions of himself in "Annie Hall", "Manhattan", "Stardust Memories" and "Hannah and her Sisters", then got other actors to play younger characters reminiscent of himself, like Seth Green in "Radio Days" or Jason Biggs in "Anything Else" or Owen Wilson in "Midnight in Paris". Blake Edwards really did the same thing by casting Dudley Moore in "10" or Richard Mulligan in "S.O.B." This doc suggests that even Jack Lemmon in "Days of Wine and Roses" was playing another version of Edwards, though I guess when Blake realized this, he promptly quit drinking. Many of his main characters were writers or directors or artists in some way, all with personal problems and complicated love lives. Again it's like dreams where the dreamer is really playing all of the parts.
At the age of 3, Blake Edwards' mother got re-married to a director of silent movies, so after moving to Los Angeles, he grew up playing on movie sets that weren't being used. So it's perhaps only natural that he became an actor after World War II, but a back injury led him to take up directing instead. His filmography is mostly hits with only a few misses - "Darling Lili" and "Skin Deep" and "A Fine Mess" are not well regarded, but when you balance them against "Breakfast at Tiffany's", "Operation Petticoat", "Days of Wine and Roses", "10" and the Pink Panther movies, I guess you've got to give him the benefit of the doubt overall. Look, I didn't care much for "Sunset", "Switch" and "City Heat" but I think they made money.
I'm split now on the "Pink Panther" series because they kept making movies after Peter Sellers died, I think they should have just stopped in reverence to the actor who made them so funny. "Trail of the Pink Panther" was assembled out of leftover gags that weren't used in the first five movies, and then by "Curse of the Pink Panther" Inspector Clouseau was notoriously absent, and then they tried to replace him with Roberto Benigni as his illegitimate son. Yeah, nice try but I think the Steve Martin reboot later proved that wasn't really the way to go.
I think he was ahead of the curve when it came to gender-based comedy - most people had never seen anything like "Victor/Victoria" before, where a struggling female performer decided to impersonate a female impersonator. So a woman playing a man playing a woman, you can practically hear the sound of people's minds being blown in 1982. But then on the other side of that coin we have the racial stereotypes of Mickey Rooney's Asian landlord in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and also Burt Kwouk playing the crazy Karate trainer Cato in the "Pink Panther" movies. Add in a third mis-step, with Peter Sellers playing a clumsy Indian actor in "The Party". PBS felt the need to run a disclaimer about Asian stereotypes depicted in this film when they included this in the "American Masters" series, along with a link to where you could go to learn more about how those films were made at a different time.
Blake Edwards received an Honorary Academy Award in 2004, but as you'll see in this doc, he just couldn't resist the temptation to try and turn it into a slapstick bit, with the help of Jim Carrey presenting the award and doing a really bad job at pretending that Edwards' motorized wheelchair was out of control. Well, that's really what Blake Edwards was all about, doing lowbrow comedy in a highbrow setting, but it just didn't always land. Most of the time, sure, but not always.
If you get a chance, please DONATE to PBS, don't wait for the next pledge break. Your donations will help keep more episodes of "American Masters" coming and other important educational programming alive.
Directed by Danny Gold (director of "The Super Bob Einstein Movie" and "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast")
Also starring Julie Andrews (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Scott Alexander, Jay Chandrasekhar (last seen in "Easter Sunday"), Bo Derek (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Geoffrey Edwards, Jennifer Edwards (last seen in "Hard Time: The Premonition"), Paul Feig (last seen in "Ghostheads"), Rian Johnson, Larry Karaszewski, Leonard Maltin (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Monica Mancini, Rob Marshall, Patton Oswalt (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Lesley Ann Warren (last seen in "Teaching Mrs. Tingle")
with archive footage of Blake Edwards, Colin Blakely, Peter Bogdanovich (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Jim Carrey (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Tony Curtis (last seen in "The Last Tycoon"), John Derek (last seen in "All the King's Men"), Peter Falk (last seen in "Faye"), William Holden (ditto), Natalie Wood (ditto), Steve Franken, James Garner (last seen in "Murphy's Romance"), Cary Grant (last seen in "Call Me Kate"), Larry Hagman (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Emma Walton Hamilton (last seen in "Switch"), Oliver Hardy (last seen in "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Stan Laurel (ditto), Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Sam Jones (last seen in "Ted 2"), Burt Kwouk (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Matt Lattanzi, Chris Lemmon (last seen in "Blonde"), Jack Lemmon (last seen in "Valerie"), Henry Mancini (last seen in "Quincy"), Dudley Moore (also last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Richard Mulligan, Ryan O'Neal (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), George Peppard (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Robert Preston (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Lee Remick (last seen in "Anatomy of a Murder"), Julia Roberts (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Mickey Rooney (last seen in "My Mom Jayne"), Dick Sargent, Peter Sellers (last seen in "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?"), Omar Sharif (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Dick Shawn (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Robert Vaughn (last seen in "Superman III"), Robert Webber (last seen in "The Sandpiper")
RATING: 6 out of 10 episodes of "Peter Gunn"
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