THE GREAT RACE

 

The other day at my Friday night watch party for historical movies, I showed The Great Race.  It’s a 1965 slapstick epic directed by Blake Edwards, which I first saw in a cinema when I was four. (We were living in Brighton, England, and saw it on my brother’s birthday.) It isn’t the first movie I saw—I’m certain I’d seen the Disney comedy The Monkey’s Uncle several months before—but it was one of the first.

The story goes literally all over the place:  it’s very loosely based on an actual 1908 automobile race westward from New York City to Paris.  It features the cartoonishly dashing daredevil hero Leslie the Great (Tony Curtis, in a parody of his past hero roles), the cartoonishly sour villain Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon, cast against type), and the cartoonishly militant suffragette reporter Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood—this was a time when a woman demanding equal rights with men was considered comedy gold).  Leslie wears White and Fate wears black, and their cars are the same colors.  Leslie and Maggie get into a “battle of the sexes” comedy, which you don’t see much today—the last one I recall is Julia Roberts’ The Runaway Bride, and that was over twenty years ago!  (No points for guessing they’re in for a romantic ending.) Peter Falk has the funniest role as Fate’s often-unreliable stooge.

The story structure isn’t complicated.  After the race starts they head west to a frontier town, leading to a big saloon-fight set piece. (Filming a large-scale brawl has the same problem as filming an orgy—they have to be staged and filmed in an orderly way, so they’re bound to look like something staged and orderly.) Then they cross from Alaska to Siberia on an iceberg.  

Then they come to a Ruritanian kingdom where Fate’s resemblance to a feckless king about to be crowned (Lemmon has a double role) leads to his getting kidnapped by a baron and a Prisoner of Zenda-Graustark type adventure.  We’ve seen all this before, but that’s kind of the point.  It all culminates in a huge pie-fight set piece. (Maggie spends most of this sequence wearing little more than a corset—Hollywood movies in the mid-1960s were a bit on the meretricious side.)  In the end, when they reach Paris, Leslie proves his love for Maggie by letting Fate win the race, but Fate proves a sore winner and uses his car’s cannon to knock down the Eiffel Tower.

How good is the movie?  Well, it’s all quite cartoonish. Some of the gags are funny but it’s very hit-and-miss, and the overall tone is frantic and shrill. (The movie’s dedicated to Laurel and Hardy, who did a lot more with a lot less.) Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines came out about the same time and does that epic slapstick more successfully.  That version benefited from having Terry-Thomas as the villain, and this movie could have used Terry-Thomas as Fate or even as the Ruritanian baron.  The real stars are the classic cars driven by Leslie and Fate.

I’ve seen it several times, but I probably wouldn’t be interested in it except for what I remember seeing that first time.  The opening credits sequence is done in the style of early silent movies, and I remembered that it opens with a card saying “Ladies, kindly remove your hats.” (At the age of four, I could already read!) Early cinemas actually had cards saying that, because back then ladies often wore big hats that obstructed the view of those sitting behind them.  The crowd in the opening fairground scene looked really huge to someone my age.  And the scene where Leslie sneaks into the baron’s castle and has a sword fight with him scared me witless!  I’m the sort who treasures early memories…