For such a successful director, Blake Edwards is hardly talked or written about anymore, if he ever was. I’ve been going through his films recently, including his magnificent 1980s run, and I’m continually surprised by how many hits he had, how many classics he helmed, and the enduring popularity of his most famous creation: the Pink Panther. Forget the Peter Sellers movies (of which there are half a dozen); this is a series that spawned a cartoon and an iconic theme song, one that most people still recognize. Remarkably, Edwards was most prolific in the last decade of his professional life, the 1980s, a time when other former studio directors were either retired, stewing in resentment, or forever licking their wounds over career-ending bombs.
I keep thinking of Billy Wilder, who quit after 1982’s Buddy Buddy. He lived another 20 years, outwardly content and satisfied to receive the honors of a living master from just about every major director working in Hollywood at the turn of the millennium. But he never stopped wanting to make films: he famously begged Steven Spielberg to let him direct Schindler’s List just weeks before Spielberg was set to leave for Prague for preproduction. With tears in his eyes, he told Spielberg, “This is my life,” and Spielberg just shrugged his shoulders. What can you do? After all, if this was 1950 and, say, Allan Dwan came to Wilder and begged to direct Sunset Boulevard, Wilder wouldn’t have been any more gracious than Spielberg. He probably would’ve told Dwan to fuck off, just like he told Louis B. Mayer after the movie’s premiere.
Wilder’s been studied, feted, and regularly revived in the 24 years since his death. At least half a dozen of his films—Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend—are widely regarded as nonpareil classics, and he’s one of the only comic filmmakers who’ve comfortably made it into the canon. Wilder made more than comedies, but even Double Indemnity and especially Sunset Boulevard are much funnier and far smarter than most movies, then or now. Although he was a satirist and dealt often with sex, he was never crude, rude, bawdy, or broad, unlike, for example, Jerry Lewis, a master filmmaker dismissed in his own country and considered a god in continental Europe.
Blake Edwards can’t even get the same backhanded appreciation; he remains a curiously under-discussed filmmaker, especially for someone who had multiple hits years after the studio system collapsed. You can ask most people middle-aged and older about 10 or Victor/Victoria and not only will they remember them, they’ll have stories: finding mint 10 trading cards in a gas station gift shop, catching Ellen Barkin on HBO in 1991’s Switch, or Burt Reynolds in the 1983 remake of François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women. But film critics, scholars, and obsessives have yet to properly evaluate Edwards’ body of work.
Operation Petticoat (1959), his sixth film, was a huge hit in 1959 and 1960; it made more money than Some Like It Hot, Pillow Talk, Imitation of Life, Suddenly Last Summer, Rio Bravo, North by Northwest, and Anatomy of a Murder (it was bested only by Ben-Hur and The Shaggy Dog). Cary Grant and Tony Curtis star in this featherweight war comedy, then a popular genre, one which would continue in movies and in television for years, including Hogan’s Heroes and a 1977 series of Operation Petticoat itself. Grant plays a Rear Admiral about to retire the USS Sea Tiger, a ship he helmed during the war; the movie’s one long flashback, as Grant goes over his logbook and remembers when eager and inexperienced Tony Curtis showed up, and when a dozen nurses were commissioned for no logical reason other than to give the movie something to work with. It’s all very Mr. Rogers—minus the songs—and easy, breezy watching, especially if you recognize all of the young actors who’d go on to become television stars: Gavin MacLeod, Dick Sargent, Dina Merrill, and Marion Ross.
Although it was shot by Russell Harlan, Operation Petticoat suffers from a kind of plastic, inedible sweetness common to mid-century Hollywood movies made without Technicolor. High-key lighting was still the only way to do it, particularly in comedy, and it doesn’t help that there are only so many colors that you can use on an American Naval vessel—gray and blue, really. The Pink Panther films have the same problem, but by the late-1970s, Edwards’ work resembled Robert Altman more than anyone else: glorious widescreen, inky blacks, velvety saturation, and a gauzy image close to the flash developing in vogue at the time.
But for the first half of his career, Edwards stuck to conventional Hollywood lighting and visual grammar, gradually honing his abilities as a composer of the widescreen frame and emerging a as a master of the form in 1979 with 10. But this is insignificant compared to what really distinguishes Edwards: he dealt with sex, men and women, and American politesse for his entire career, from the 1950s through the start of the 1990s. According to Ellen Barkin, “He really wants to know what it’s like to be a woman,” and he comes at women from a completely different angle than most directors, certainly most Hollywood directors. The situations and sexual mores of his 1980s films are still recognizable, while much of the humor of Operation Petticoat depends on Greatest Generation attitudes towards women in the workplace, women in the army, women in general. It’s both tame and surprisingly rude now, a product of its time; remember, this is Cary Grant’s most successful film, and it’s more or less been lost to time.
No great tragedy there, but Edwards’ body of work remains to be reexamined and celebrated.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM