by ·Comments Off on The Party (1968, Blake Edwards)

The same day I wished I was watching Mon Oncle during the WC Fields three-story house routines, I end up watching Blake and Peter Sellers make an American Tati movie. And like the Fields movie this has barely a plot (inept foreigner is fired from a movie and accidentally invited to the studio boss’s fancy party), is more about putting a comedian in a setting where he can get into hijinks. The normally racially-sensitive Edwards decided Sellers should be in brownface, because white British men weren’t permitted to be as socially weird as the script requires until the 1990 invention of Mr. Bean.

The hot French girl (mainly known for having shot her boyfriend) likes our guy, but is menaced by her McHale’s Navy costar Gavin MacLeod. Party host Alice was in anti-marijuana picture Assassin of Youth, and the film director was downgraded to a TV director in The Fortune Cookie. Drunk Waiter Steve Franken is the breakout star, went on to appear in some late Jerry Lewis films.

Sellers and the Drunk Waiter:

by ·Comments Off on Experiment in Terror (1962, Blake Edwards)

Lee Remick (of Wild River and A Face in the Crowd, great in this) is a banker who gets phoned up by a psycho and threatened into stealing some money, in a 5-minute close-range opening scene with no music. Warned not to contact police, she calls Glenn Ford anyway, and he investigates, talking with Patricia Huston, who ends up dead.

Patricia is discovered by the landlord, “Mr. Curry” in my notes but maybe I just wrote that cuz he looks like Tim Curry:

A stoolie named Popcorn gives Glenn some leads, the killer’s girlfriend refuses to cooperate and says he’s a good man who pays for her son’s medical treatments. The baddie eventually kidnaps Lee’s sister Toby (Stefanie Powers, future star of Hart to Hart) to guarantee compliance, and arranges the handoff at Candlestick Park during a Giants/Dodgers game, where things go wrong for him, and he’s gunned down by Glenn Ford on the pitcher’s mound.

The baddie also sneaks up on Lee in a hallway disguised as an old woman… I forget why:

Written by The Gordons, who are best known for That Darn Cat!, and scored by Henry Mancini, the opening theme sounding like a warmup for The Pink Panther the following year.

by ·Comments Off on Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961, Blake Edwards)

Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that Audrey Hepburn’s character was named Holly Golightly, but elsewhere I assumed she was named Tiffany. The jewelry store never occurred to me.

5-time oscar-nominated audrey/tiffany:
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I read that Holly is a “call girl” and that she’s a “socialite”. I prefer the latter. Audrey (who I barely remember from Charade) runs around with a buncha guys looking for a nice rich man to marry, but she sorta falls for boring lumpy novelist George Peppard (Hannibal from the A-Team!). He falls harder for her, for obvious reasons, and their relationship seems like an excuse for us to get to watch her for two hours, which is worth doing anyway.

Patricia Neal (Cookie in Cookie’s Fortune, and herself in Bright Leaves) is a neighbor, Buddy Ebsen (Barnaby Jones and Jed Clampett!) is Holly’s ex-husband, and Andy “Mickey Rooney” Hardy plays a surprisingly horrible Japanese caricature of an upstairs neighbor (“Miss Goriightryyy!!”). Audrey’s cat “Cat” is in almost every scene. Blake “Pink Panther / Peter Gunn” Edwards directs from a Truman Capote story (my second, after The Innocents (also from ’61)).

“the most distasteful thing I ever had to do on film”:
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won an honorary oscar:
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A good movie (when Rooney’s not onscreen), but not a romantic comedy like I thought it’d be… more of a drama / character exploration. Holly has a hidden past as a rural wife and homemaker with a dear brother who’s off at war (she renames Peppard “Fred” after her brother) and she doesn’t do relationships very well. It sometimes seems like a story of a modern liberated woman, but then Peppard will go into his spiel about how she belongs to him and people need to be together, and is he proven right at the end?

Katy suggested/liked it.