The Great Race (1964) **** – Seen at the Cinema

And not just any old cinema, but the 87-year-old Fine Arts in Los Angeles, I guess the second oldest movie house still standing there, with admission a princely 50 cents and the whole place done out in a gaudy red. I was taking time out from a research mission to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ (the Oscar people) equally famous Margaret Herrick Library, where I was digging up stuff for my next book about the films of Alistair MacLean.

And where I discovered to my unimaginable delight they they had my books on their shelves. I’ll never win an Oscar and bestsellerdom will continue to evade me, but for a writer of books on movies, there can be no greater honor than to have your works on the shelves of Hollywood’s most important library. Since data protection will prevent me from discovering who has checked out my books, I can safely imagine that it was bound to be Harrison Ford, Greta Gerwig, Christopher Nolan and/or Steven Spielberg.

Anyway, enough of that self-congratulatory nonsense and on with the show. If you’ve any memory of this picture – jaunty jalopies battling it out at the start of the 20^th century when suffragettes were raising hell – it’ll be for the slapstick. The upfront feminism most likely  passed you by. A savvier female you would be hard put to find, especially one that susses out exactly that when a male falls in with her views it’s just to get her into bed. So, from the contemporary perspective, this is a far harder-nosed picture than the fluffy narrative suggests.

Setting aside the famous pie-throwing homage to silent film pie-throwing (and every circus clown act since Doomsday) and a couple of sequences that outlive their welcome and the odd decision to find a plotline that can accommodate Jack Lemmon going down the (almost) identical twin route, this is pretty much sheer delight.

Characters could not be more black-and-white – in visual terms as well – than rival mechanical whizzes The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) and Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon) except for the much more rounded (in character terms) interloper Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood) as a reporter. Not content with being a legend in his own lunctime, the mad professor follows the Gore Vidal tack of being upset by any rival’s successes. However, he’s such an incompetent saboteur he doesn’t realize he’s merely the feed for a number of superb visual gags.

The Great Leslie, smile resounding with the Colgate audible zing, doesn’t have much to do except expound the principles of fair play and occasionally demonstrate his fencing skills when the plot turns sideways. Maggie is the ace inveigler, and when that doesn’t work resorts to handcuffs to ensure she will not be moved or someone else will be stuck fast. Standard bearer for female equality, she manages to put all the arguments without sounding dull, especially as, verbally, she is dealing with a keen dueller. And when she’s not switching sides, she’s rooting for the good guy.

The plot could have come out of a dishwasher but roughly equates to a round-the-world road race with most countries conveniently missed out, ending up in Paris with a stop-off somewhere in Germany. The deliberately cartoonish feel shouldn’t work at all, especially for a contemporary audience, but then we all laughed at Dumb and Dumber and plenty comedies with even less of a one-note touch. Thankfully, there was no such thing as deconstructed comedy in those days so everyone enters the spirit of the thing. And it’s quite refreshing to watch stuff being blown up and falling apart not for overblown thriller or comicbook reasons.  

I wasn’t taken with the overlong sequence in the saloon – extended singing and brawl (heck, what else are saloons for) – and wasn’t so hot on the legendary pie section either and certainly the notion that Professor Fate could be such a doppelganger for a dumb German prince that the powers behind the throne plan to substitute one for the other seems to belong in the furthest reaches of the Far Fetched Highway.

But there are so many gags and the characters, no matter how cartoonish at times, seem true to themselves, and with Maggie on hand to constantly upset the misogynistic applecart it seems a tad picky to be so picky. I was astonished that the audience I watched it with, primarily much younger than I, were so tickled.

Tony Curtis (The Boston Strangler, 1968) and Jack Lemmon (How to Murder Your Wife, 1965) repeat the magic of Some Like it Hot (1959) thanks to the strong directorial hand of Blake Edwards (The Pink Panther, 1963). Natalie Wood (Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, 1969) shines. Rare comedy role from Peter Falk (Penelope, 1966). Excellent support from Keenan Wynn (Warning Shot, 1966). Edwards co-wrote the script with Arthur A. Ross (Brubaker, 1980).

Certainly more than stands the test of time.