The passing of Blake Edwards marks the end of an era.
He was in many ways one of the most interesting filmmakers working in Hollywood during the past 50 years.
Best known for his comedies, particularly the Pink Panther cycle, Edwards was a remarkably versatile director whose career straddled the end of the studio system and lasted into the 1990s.
Beyond his work as a comedy director, Edwards also crafted a number of excellent dramatic films, most notably Days of Wine and Roses, with its powerful lead performance by Jack Lemmon. It has, however, always been Edwards’ work as a comedy director that has most fascinated me. When he was presented with a special Academy Award, he made a most memorable entrance firmly entrenched in the kind of slapstick that would become a trademark of his films.
Looking back at his body of work reveals the breadth and scope of his filmography, and most importantly, his contributions to the art of screen comedy. His most fertile comic period was the 1960s, in which he worked in at least three distinctly different modes with astonishing success.
Edwards’ comedy work ran a remarkable range. His first major comic success, Operation Petticoat, starred Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, and was firmly entrenched in the tradition of the Hollywood sex comedy of the 1950s.
These films were really the post-war answer to the romantic comedy, rooted partly in the screwball tradition but without the kind of carefree abandon of those films. Edwards’ major contribution to screen comedy came in the seminal year of 1963, with the first of the Pink Panther films.
1963 was a highly important transitional year for American screen comedy.
Two other important comedies were released that year: Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor. Kramer’s film launched the genre of the epic comedy, which would become a major format during the late 1960s. Lewis’ film was firmly entrenched in comedian comedy – a comedy based around a strong central comedian with a strong, clearly defined persona – which largely disappeared in the late 1960s, and was only sustained largely by the films of Woody Allen (until it was made popular again in the late 1970s with films starring cast members from television’s “Saturday Night Live”). Edwards would make his own contribution to the “epic” comedy genre in 1965, with The Great Race.
But The Pink Panther and its immediate sequel, A Shot in the Dark, would introduce the kind of sophisticated Continental sex comedy laced with slapstick that would become another major current in 60s comedy.
The first film, in particular, demonstrates the kind of tensions at work in constructing a comedy of this sort. Ostensibly a vehicle for David Niven, playing the charming jewel thief, the most memorable performance in the film came from Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. The main narrative, involving Niven and the theft of the diamond, was linked strongly with the 1950s Hollywood sex comedies, teeming with European sophistication and a kind of winking, knowing sexuality that never quite pushed the boundaries into bad taste, though it may have seemed as though it badly wanted to at times.
Conversely, the subplot, featuring the hopelessly clueless and clumsy detective, gelled with the kind of slapstick and quirky characterization that was immensely popular with viewers, partly because it re-introduced physical comedy to the screen, which had been largely absent from feature-length comedies of the 50s. Inspector Clouseau would become the main character in A Shot in the Dark, released in 1964, and beginning with Return of the Pink Panther in 1975, would mark a long line of sequels to the original 1963 film.
When Edwards made The Great Race in 1965, he worked with two fine actors – Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon – in the lead roles, rather than performers known primarily as comedians, though certainly both Curtis and Lemmon were quite adept at comedy (having previously co-starred in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot).
The main focus of this comedy was violent slapstick, hearkening back to the silent days. Edwards acknowledged his influence by dedicating the film to “Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy”. Their influence is most evident in the great pie fight sequence, clearly inspired by Laurel and Hardy’s The Battle of the Century (1927). However, Edwards’ version of the pie fight demonstrates the tendency toward loud, brash slapstick that was coming to dominate in 60s comedy.
Edwards’ next major comic work came in 1968 with The Party, the only non-Clouseau film he ever made with Peter Sellers.
Playing an Indian actor working in Hollywood, Sellers ends up accidentally invited to a big party at the home of a Hollywood producer after being fired from a role in a Gunga Din-type epic. A sharp satire on 1960s Hollywood, it also borrowed from the work being done by Jacques Tatí in France during the same time, with its emphasis on Bazinian long takes, mise-en-scene and sustained bits of character business that seem to be rather clearly inspired by scenes in Tatí’s work, such as the scenes at dinner, and when Sellers loses a shoe in a pool.
Although the film is largely international in flavor, it still steeped in the culture of the period; the ending introducing us back to the late-60s American counterculture as a group of hippies show up at the party.
Through these films, Edwards played a major role in shaping the directions screen comedy would take in the next several decades.
