Film maker Blake Edwards on set in 1982.
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But Edwards also walked on the Wilder side, in the corrosive S.O.B., an embroidered hate letter to Hollywood (and to James Aubrey — it was the other script Edwards wrote during his self-imposed European exile). S.O.B. also bore a dark autobiographical streak, since it was about a formerly hotshot producer (Richard Mulligan) whose big-budget family musical starring his wife (Andrews) is a flop, just like Darling Lili; the producer resolves to recut the film with R-rated sequences, including a shot of his wife going topless. Yep, the movies' Sound of Music secular saint was to bare her chest. Fortunately for Edwards, Andrews was game for anything. In his Oscar speech he called her "the beautiful English broad with the incomparable soprano and promiscuous vocabulary."
She got to flash both of those attributes in Edwards's 1982 Victor Victoria, based on Reinhold Schunzel's 1933 German comedy about a female singer who masquerades as a male singer in drag. Largely dispensing with knockabout farce, this long, blithe, clever film earned Edwards his only Oscar nomination, for adapted screenplay. Andrews, Robert Preston and Lesley Ann Warren were shortlisted for acting awards; and Mancini, who worked on nearly every Edwards feature, took the statuette for best score. It was the director's last hit movie, though in 1995 he, Mancini and lyricist Leslie Bricusse brought a musical version to Broadway. For her performance, Andrews received a Tony nomination ; she declined it because the nominating committee had snubbed everyone else in the production, especially her husband.
THE HAMLET WHO PLAYED CLOWN
Why did Edwards concentrate on broad comedy? Not only because it was dear to his creative heart, and it often paid off at the box office, but because he knew first-hand the baleful moods for which the most effective antidote may be a pie in the face. "Tragedy is when I cut my finger," Mel Brooks famously noted. "Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." Often in Edwards' life the two poles stretched out before him, then collapsed together. As a member of the Coast Guard during World War II, he got drunk one night and dived into a shallow swimming pool. The punch line to that caper was five months in traction at a Naval hospital. Edwards later said that Eleanor Roosevelt, on a tour of the hospital, solicitously asked how the young hero got injured.
Edwards was the Hamlet who played clown: a lifelong depressive who endured a 15-year battle with Chronicle Fatigue Syndrome (which he related in the 2000 documentary I Remember Me). At one point he became "seriously suicidal." As the New York Times describes the incident, "After deciding that shooting himself would be too messy and drowning too uncertain, he decided to slit his wrists on the beach at Malibu while looking at the ocean. But while he was holding a two-sided razor, his Great Dane started licking his ear, and his retriever, eager for a game of fetch, dropped a ball in his lap. Attempting to get the dog to go away, Mr. Edwards threw the ball, dropped the razor and dislocated his shoulder. 'So I think to myself,' he said, 'this just isn't a day to commit suicide.' Trying to retrieve the razor, he stepped on it and ended up in the emergency room."
The twin cappers to this story sound fanciful, the kind of multiple twists on a gag that Edwards called "topping the topper." In the second of his Pink Panther movies, A Shot in the Dark, Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, lounging cozily on a bed with Elke Sommer, lights the lady's cigarette and his own, puts the lighter inside his trenchcoat, the flame still burning, and the coat starts smoldering. "Is it stuffy in here?' he asks absently, and Elke says, "Your coat!" "Yes, it is my coat," he mildly acknowledges. Elke: "But it's on fire!" He removes the garment, and as he stomps out the conflagration near the bedroom door, another man briskly opens it, propelling Clouseau through an open window. Top, topper, toppest, all in 30 seconds of screen time.
A man who could turn every tragedy into a joke, Edwards even wrote his own obituary — 46 years ago in A Shot in the Dark, in an exchange between Elke Sommer and the good Inspector. "You'll probably catch your death of pneumonia," she says concernedly. "Yes," replies Clouseau/Sellers/Edwards, "but it's all part of life's rich pageant."