Blake Edwards's The Great Race (1965)

Unlike films like 10 and Skin Deep, pictures with a splurch structure firmly rooted in ideological, emotional and dramatic logic, the gag mechanism of The Great Race appears to activate indiscriminately.

Sam Wasson, A Splurch in the Kisser:  The Movies of Blake Edwards (Wesleyan University Press, 2009).

“Some people don’t like anarchic films” Jim Hoberman once said to me.  I’m one of them.  The Great Race may be a tribute to Laurel and Hardy (the film is dedicated to them) and Mack Sennett but Laurel, Hardy, and Sennett are more tedious than funny and so is The Great Race, with its gratuitous pie-throwing and literally black-clothed and white-clothed bad guy and good guy (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis); I barely smiled at this random collection of unfunny pratfalls. 

I have a “certificate of completion” for Painfully Funny: Exploring Slapstick in the Movies from Ball State University, which perhaps qualifies me to say that slapstick without context does not work for me, i.e., I will take Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch over the Marx Brothers any day.  One theory about Blake Edwards is that he alternated meretricious movies – including seven Pink Panther movies – with the personal films he wanted to make that he knew would not be as financially successful.  One of the best of these is The Party (1968), something of a tribute to Chaplin and Keaton, with an effectively low-key Peter Sellers (who actually did not appear much in the Pink Panther movies, usually being replaced by stunt doubles).  The Party is beautifully structured and character-driven in a way The Great Race is not, though Edwards does use the wide-screen image effectively in both films.  (There was a riot by the audience at the Museum of Modern Art in NY when they showed a pan-and-scanned print of The Party at a supposed tribute to Edwards!).  In a certain sense Edwards brings film full circle, from it earliest days to the end of its classical era and beyond.