It’s been 10 years (give or take three) since I saw Blake Edwards’ A Shot in the Dark (1964), a pitch-perfect charade of bumbling immaculacy that established Peter Sellers in the role of the accident-prone Inspector Clouseau. The pair collaborated on four Pink Panther films (the original in 1963 with appendages of Return (1975), Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge (1978).
The next time I chanced to see A Shot in the Dark and also The Party was at the montage of the 76th Oscars when Edwards was honoured for his career in films. He was 82 and he had never won an Oscar!
On his entrance he whizzed past Jim Carrey, snatching the Oscar on a motorised wheelchair straight into a cardboard wall. Henry Mancini’s score from Pink Panther swelled and the audience stood up as Carry pulled him out. In Edwards’ acceptance speech he recalled a guy from The Party who scooped up elephant poop and sang “There is no business like show business.”
Mostly Edwards is known as a master of slapstick, bedlam and carnal upheavals. That was his latter career. Before comedy, he mastered drama in Days of Wine and Roses (1962), about alcoholism and breaking free, and is Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick’s career jewel.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is a precocious and glossed up romantic-drama based fleetingly on the novel by Truman Capote that is routinely acknowledged in film lists; it also plucked Audrey Hepburn out of her cutesy image of Sabrina and Roman Holiday into the mold of an eccentric, amoral, self-centred free spirit in search for financial security and maybe romance. Tiffany also plastered Hepburn in our collective memory as the poster of a high-society socialite: chic, dressed in black holding an over-sized cigarette holder.
Next, Edwards directed the open-faced thriller, An Experiment in Terror (1962), another critical success that proved his chops at other mediums. The Great Race (1965; Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood) and Pink Panther had not happened.
Although music director Henry Mancini was an Edwards regular, once the title track of Pink Panther came out, there was no looking back. The franchise lingered until Edwards’ last big film, The Son of Pink Panther (1993) with Roberto Benigni as Clouseau’s illegitimate son. By then Edwards had lost it.
In reverse order: Switch (1991) had a promiscuous Perry King turned into Ellen Barkin, all macho posturing, in what Roger Ebert calls “a performance of true comic invention.”
Skin Deep (1989), lammed universally, featured a womanising John Ritter. Before that came the critically panned Blind Date (1986) and introduced Bruce Willis to the big screen in a boozed-up comedy; their next film, Sunset (1988), got even worse reviews.
Edwards also made sure that wife Julie Andrews was anything but Mary Poppins. In the applauded Victor Victoria (1982) — a musical-comedy of mistaken identity and role-playing, she plays a woman masquerading as a man playing a woman. The couple has five more credits together: Darling Lily (1970) which was an epic commercial disaster; 10 (1979) that made Bo Derek an international sex-symbol and had Dudley Moore suffering from male menopause (it was also the biggest money maker of the year); That’s Life (1986) and this time with Jack Lemmon with menopause; The Man Who Loved Women (1983) with Burt Reynolds and the Hollywood industry satire S.O.B. (1981).
Given their farcical nature, his later films are sharply divided in critical opinion. S.O.B. was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Screenplay (he wrote most of his films) as well as a Best Comedy Screenplay by the Writers Guild of America. Edwards was also nominated for a Razzie for Worst Director as well as a nomination for Best Picture Musical/Comedy at the Golden Globes.
In some ways Blake Edwards got the best of both worlds — critical lambast and overwhelming acclaim. Edwards is survived by his wife, actress Julie Andrews, and four children.— M.K.J.
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