Like the anti-heroes of Harold & Maude and Better Off Dead, Farmer never stops trying to kill himself in slapstick pratfalls of dubious taste but undeniable comic artistry. The film opens with Edwards surrogate Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) in a state of suicidal despair after it becomes apparent that Night Wind, the massive musical he’s produced for his wife (which in turn is inspired by the earlier Edwards/Andrews collaboration Darling Lili), is destined to be a flop of historic proportions. Much of the film’s first act is devoted to a wild show-business orgy involving many of the film’s characters whose deep focus and slapstick gags, not to mention show-business party setting, calls to mind the bubblegum Jaques Tati shenanigans of Edwards’ slapstick classic The Party. Its tone and emphasis and style are perpetually changing. The film is beguilingly strange in other ways as well. The sordid allure of S.O.B. came down to, “Is Mary Poppins really going to show her boobs?” In Night Wind, the film’s within-a-film (if you think Edwards does not make his share of fart jokes with that title, then you are clearly unfamiliar with the man and his work), it comes down to, “Is Peter Pan going to show her boobs?” S.O.B. is smarter than its disreputable central claim to fame would suggest but is a staggeringly odd, strangely vital proposition that’s smart and funny and sad and wise about show-business and its casualties and collateral damage one moment, and given over to a nonsensical car chase or shootout the next. This is most prominent in the casting of Edwards’ real-life wife Julie Andrews, the embodiment of plucky wholesomeness thanks to her iconic turn as beloved children’s character Mary Poppins, as Sally Miles, the estranged actress wife of the film’s producer in S.O.B. and the embodiment of plucky wholesomeness in the film’s universe thanks to her iconic turn as beloved children’s character Peter Pan. The scathing 1981 show-business satire S.O.B. wasn’t financed by Edwards or co-written by his shrink, but it is damn near impossible to overlook the film’s autobiographical nature. When not sadistically trying to keep his Pink Panther franchise going in violent defiance of God’s will and the even stronger will of Peter Sellers, sex and slapstick master Blake Edwards, made a series of films so personal that some of them he co-wrote with his psychiatrist ( The Man Who Loved Women, a remake of Francois Truffaut’s film of the same name), some of which he financed personally and filmed in his home ( That’s Life), and a whole bunch of which co-starred his real-life wife, Julie Andrews.
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