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The thesis is James Agee's on silent-movie slapstick, Blake Edwards marshals all his resources for a lavish consummation. Début de siècle, an epoch of daredevils, of the Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) in gleaming white and Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon) with top hat and winglike cape, personalized at the onset as hot-air balloon and malfunctioning giant crossbow. (Pedal-propelled dirigibles and floundering submarines also figure in the procession of fanciful contraptions, the camera in the opening credits is an illuminated slideshow, cheering-hissing audience and all.) "Greatness is a lighthearted title for theatrical amusements," thus the journey from New York City to Paris in newfangled automobiles, covered by the nervy suffragette reporter (Natalie Wood). Pit stop in Borracho for a saloon song and brawl, extended interlude in the kingdom of Carpania for court intrigue à la Dumas—cinema and its dawn, then, from Méliès and Sennett to westerns and swashbucklers. Intermission in Alaska, a shaky truce on a melting floe. "My apologies, there's a polar bear in my car." Edwards' epic folly, a dilation of the one-reeler pratfall for Technicolor and Panavision, rich as can be. Lemmon's comic inventions with mustache-twirling (paid homage to by Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York) and foppish guffaws are part of a structure of doubles that includes assistants stout (Keenan Wynn) and dim (Peter Falk), plus twin plunges by Texas Jack (Larry Storch) and Baron Von Stuppe (Ross Martin). Damsels and square jaws and "thimble-headed gherkins" in a gallery of live-action cartoons, culminating with the voluminous painterly abstractions of the famous pie fight. "The eternal struggle takes time." The analogue, on a contrasting register but equally obsessive, is the Tarantino-Rodriguez Grindhouse. With Dorothy Provine, Arthur O'Connell, Vivian Vance, George Macready, Marvin Kaplan, Hal Smith, and Denver Pyle.
--- Fernando F. Croce |