Sock & Row

The Great Race is the most expensive comedy ever filmed; but there the superlatives end: it is not exactly the worst.

The movie's main handicap is that Director Blake Edwards (The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark) has put it together like a hobbyist assembling a model kit into an authentic reproduction of a 1908 Hupmobile, "Comedy is a science," he says. "The only way to learn a science is to study, and the only way to study is to look at what the old masters did and take from them. Race is an accumulation of dozens of the great comedy cliches."

Tony Curtis is the spoof hero. As a turn-of-the-century daredevil called The Great Leslie, he wears nothing but white, performs death-defying feats with never a hair misplaced nor a dirty fingernail. From time to time his teeth literally sparkle. Jack Lemmon, reading his lines at a steady 130 decibels, is the spoof villain. As black-clad Professor Fate, equipped with a stovepipe hat, a moustache to twirl and gnomish assistant (Peter Falk), he is forever launching devilish devices against Leslie and forever being Foiled Again. Natalie Wood is a pert, cigar-puffing suffragette who goes along as girl reporter on the great automobile race from New York tp Paris, via Siberia.

With a wham and a bam, a sock and a pow, Director Edwards' accumulation of cliches explodes around the world, pausing for Curtis to demonstrate his torso and his skill with the epee, and for Lemmon to do a tedious bit as a faggish Mittel-European prince. No pastiche of the old masters would be complete without a pie fight. This one is the Ben-Hur of pie fights--it splatters more than 2,000 real cream pies of assorted flavors, and took five days to shoot. The scene even has a plot: Will Tony Curtis get one in the snoot or won't he? Or would it be a waste of perfectly good pie? It would be a shame to divulge the answer. This is about the most interesting development in the movie's last hour or so.

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