The Great Race is one of the movies I used to watch when I was a kid. It was always on TV around the holidays. It was a loud, wacky movie with plenty of slapstick. I cannot recall when I last watched the film from beginning to end, but it has be at least 35 years. Turner Classic Movies was showing it tonight so I decided to watch it and see how well it held up.
First off, it is a long movie. Two hours and forty five minutes including the Overture, Intermission, Entre' Act and Exit music. The film was released back in 1965 when Hollywood still made movies with Intermissions. The film was written and directed by Blake Edwards and is based on the actual 1908 New York to Paris motor car race. In creating an epic comedy that included a huge bar room brawl, a sword fight, a "Prisoner of Zenda" subplot and a massive pie throwing fight, Edwards was attempting to make the funniest movie ever made. He failed. The movie was a box office success, but a huge critical flop.
Tony Curtis stars as the Great Leslie who is competing against Professor Fate, a Snidely Whiplash type, to reach Paris by motor car. Natalie Wood is a female reporter and suffragette who rides along and Keenan Wynn is Leslie's friend and assistant, while Peter Falk is Professor Fate's dutiful henchman. All of them have a lot of fun hamming it up, but Jack Lemmon acts the entire movie at the top of his voice and it becomes very grating. Lemmon also has a dual role as Crown Prince Hapnick and he has hams it up here as well.
The movie pulls out every slapstick joke imaginable and has multiple running gags. There are some good set pieces, but it is way too long and drawn out. The actual race does not even start until fifty minutes into the film. Once the race begins the movie features three main scenes; travels across the American west, stranded on an iceberg between Alaska and Siberia and in the fictional kingdom of Carpania. During the entire race Lemmon yells and Curtis and Wood argue, while Falk and Wynn suffer silently.
There are a number of smaller roles starring Vivian Vance, Larry Storch, Arthur O'Connell and Ross Martin. Martin plays Baron von Stuppe with elegant evil. He and Leslie have an excellent sword fight. When Leslie is winning Stuppe exits with the line "he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day" then he literally drops out of the picture and does not reappear to finish the dual with Leslie.
I can see why I liked the film as a kid, and there are still a few good chuckles, but in the end it is like one long running gag, and its not that funny.
At the Movie House rating **1/2 stars
2 comments:
Your review of The great Race is excellent and right on.
You don;t know me, but I am fairly certain you were in the theater when I saw this as a kid
It is quite possible we saw the movie in the same theatre, but it came out in 1965 and I was only five years old and have no recollection of seeing it.
I do know I enjoyed it as a kid, but now it is more annoying than fun. It's like a live action cartoon with Jack Lemmon playing Wiley E. Coyote and Tony Curtis as the Road Runner.
They were much better together in Some Like It Hot.
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