Good taste, Blake Edwards wasn’t into. His penchant for parodic excess got him into trouble as often as it paid off in comic spades. Yet he was a singular directorial talent, more jaundiced and visually skillful than many tend to remember.
Often it was the simplest bits that made his movies. Such as? Such as Peter Sellers at the billiards table as Inspector Clouseau in “A Shot in the Dark” (1964), which followed the original “Pink Panther” movie (same year). The subsequent “Pink Panther” installments made Edwards bankable again, though they weren’t very good — at their worst, in fact, through their coarseness, they partially undid the reputations of the first two. But scan his resume, and you see everything from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) to “Days of Wine and Roses” (1962) to “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” (1966) to “The Party” (1968), the latter, virtually plot-free, influenced by French master Jacques Tati’s “Play Time” (1967).
Most likely in its first television airing, “The Great Race” (1965) served as my preteen introduced to Edwards. While hardly his best, the film may have been Edwards’ most. Outsized physical comedy in his work often went two or three yards further than what the average filmgoer would describe as comfortable.
“It’s sadistic,” says Sam Wasson, author of “A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards,” published by Wesleyan Film press. “Anybody reaching beyond their grasp gets splurched in a Blake Edwards movie. Blake realized that after enough pain, emotionally or physically, it starts to be funny. One insult to your body or your dignity is unfortunate; two is terrible; three is hilarious.
“That’s what his best films, particularly the later ones, are all about. It’s the metaphysical law of threes, enlightenment through slapstick.”
I may yet come around on more of that later, explicitly confessional work. No matter. As scored, wonderfully, by Henry Mancini, Edwards’ hardiest commercial outings (including “Peter Gunn” on TV) in the 1950s and ’60s typify both a sparkle and a tough comic swagger. They were unique to their times. They had just enough venom to keep the jokes interesting. The man who made them died Wednesday at 88 in Santa Monica, Calif., of pneumonia.
