RIP Blake Edwards

There’s a sad inevitability to the fact that Blake Edwards’ career was reduced in death to pretty what it had been in life, at least for the last 35 years.  Edwards is destined to be remembered as the writer/director of the “Pink Panther” films, a series of increasingly thin farces designed around the mugging of Peter Sellers.  The first instalment came off the Edwards production line back in 1963 and was more an ensemble comedy than a dedicated vehicle for the ex-Goon.  Such was the popularity of Seller’s bumbling gendarme Inspector Clouseau that he and Edwards almost immediately re-teamed for an even funnier sequel, “A Shot in the Dark”.  Four years later Clouseau was even played by another actor - Alan Arkin - in a project that Edwards had nothing directly to do with.

By 1975 Edwards’ career was in trouble.  He had made three flops in a row: the WW I spy comedy “Darling Lili”, the much underrated western “Wild Rovers”, and the cold war romance “The Tamarind Seed”.  The first and last of these featured his wife Julie Andrews, an actress he seldom directed with much box office success.  Reviving the Pink Panther series seemed a good way for both director and star to rebuild their Hollywood reputations.  And so a formula was put in place which survived even the death of Sellers himself: Clouseau in a series of ridiculous costumes and pratfalls, butchering the French language, ever challenged in hand-to-hand combat by his faithful Asian side kick Cato and testing the patience of his boss cum nemesis, Herbert Lom’s Chief Inspector Dreyfus.

Those who were dismayed by qualitative decline of the films across the three made in the 1970s were in for a surprise thereafter.  When Sellers finally succumbed to his heart condition in 1980 Edwards just went right on making Pink Panther movies, constructing flimsy narratives out of nostalgic yearning for the absent star and footage from the cutting room floor.  He then tried replacing Sellers entirely, employing a pre-Life is Beautiful Roberto Benigni as Clouseau’s illegitimate son.  Thankfully this flopped.  The recent revival of the series with Steve Martin had no creative input from Edwards.

Outside of the Panther movies Edwards was a writer/director who could be best described as a poor man’s Billy Wilder.  His answer to Wilder’s “Some Like it Hot” was the cross-dressing hit “Victor/Victoria”.  His version of “Sunset Boulevard” was “S.O.B.”, a bitter attack on contemporary studio politics that similarly starred William Holden.  Edwards drew one of the great dramatic performances ever from Jack Lemmon, Wilder’s most regular interpreter.  The film in question, “Days of Wine and Roses”, was a variation on Wilder’s classic “The Lost Weekend”.  Edwards’ use of Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” used the actress even more iconically than Wilder did in “Sabrina” and “Love in the Afternoon”, and he managed to successfully work with both Cary Grant (in the Wilderesque “Operation Petticoat”) and Peter Sellers, something Wilder longed to do but never quite pulled off.

History will not judge the last phase of Edwards’ career kindly.  Awful, witless slapstick like “Skin Deep” and “Switch” alternated with remakes and rehashes of earlier projects or just bland work like “Sunset” in which a chance to recreate silent era Hollywood was squandered.  Even in his 60s hey day gargantuan farces like “The Great Race” were only mixed successes.  “The Party”, from 1968, has a cult following, Sellers’ brown face Indian parody the kind of genial racism that white audiences have always found hilarious.

Aside from undeniable classics like “Tiffany’s” and “Roses” I personally rate two of Edwards’ less bombastic features.  “10″ has never enjoyed much respect, with most critics unable to get over the slow motion scenes of Bo Derek running down the beach.  However, I would argue that its treatment of a bourgeois mid-life crisis has some merit beyond the obvious belly laughs and it provides Dudley Moore with his finest leading role.  “That’s Life” is just as good, an semi-autobiographical family comedy drama about facing mortality.  Jack Lemmon gives a performance worthy of a Wilder movie.