The Great Race

The Great Race (1965)

Runtime: 160 minutes

Directed by: Blake Edwards

Starring: Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Keenan Wynn

From: Warner Bros.

Why not view a screwball comedy, even if it's 160 minutes long?

This movie played late last night on Turner Classic Movies and as I like screwball humor, its length was not too much of a concern. I easily got through the 197 minute version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, after all. Blake Edwards made this as a tribute to the silent movies... to me it was more like a live action Looney Tunes cartoon, which is fine also.

Tony Curtis plays The Great Leslie, a showman who always dresses in white and does dangerous stunts. His rival is Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), clad in black and who always tries to thwart those attempts or tries to top his opponent, to no avail. Leslie is assisted by Keenan Wynn, while Fate's partner is Peter Falk. The heroes are low-key while Lemmon and Falk... “over the top” doesn't even begin to describe those performances. Anyhow, both sides decide to join a New York to Paris auto race, where of course they drive West instead of East. Oh yeah, it's the turn of the 20th century and the plot is based on there actually being a 1908 New York to Paris race, back when there were hardly any roads to speak of and automobiles were in their infancy. In addition, Natalie Wood is also there as a suffragette who

Of course this has its ups and downs and some segments I did not love as much as others. Even then, I was never bored with a genre effort that I normally prefer be much shorter and for me, the biggest risk was being fatigued by something that was usually pretty LOUD and unsubtle. All that said, I can still say this was pretty good. This had enough laughs throughout to where I was never annoyed or bored. Every main player was funny and Lemmon had a dual role where he also played a foppish prince of a fictitious country that uses a Cyrillic alphabet and he laughs like Pee Wee Herman; curious. For what was the most expensive comedy of all time at this point, naturally everything is big in scale, including all the locations visited & some epic stunts and bravura moments that are borrowed from famous scenes of old; e.g., like a barroom brawl held in a place that wasn't a bar at a dusty old saloon and other scenes I dare not spoil here.


There's also an appropriate Henry Mancini score and while this sort of comedy will naturally not appeal to everyone, it at least entertained me in being so damn zany.