Before the film The Great Race came out in 1965, my parents took me to a preview/tour over on the Warner Brothers lot. We got a real crummy tour of the Warner Brothers lot riding around on a little tram. The one thing I remember about the tour was that the tram passed a prop foam rubber statue of Abraham Lincoln which I instantly recognized as the one into which Eddie "Rochester" Anderson (actually, his stuntman Loren James) bounded in Mad World.
Then we were herded into a tent and shown a 10-minute preview of the forthcoming film, which looked pretty good, and after it we were turned out into an exhibit of props from the movie. They had several of its incredible cars there and they'd been gimmicked so their lights flashed and their special effects were demonstrated via automation. The cars "spoke" to us with pre-recorded voices boasting about their vital roles in the forthcoming Blake Edwards masterpiece…and being a cartoon expert, I easily recognized that all the voices of the automobiles had been done by Paul Frees. In the movie, Some Like It Hot, Frees dubbed in some of Tony Curtis's dialogue. Here, he was dubbing Tony's car.
Then I remember my parents a few weeks later taking me to see the movie at the Pantages Theater up in Hollywood. Throughout its long history, the Pantages has vacillated between showing movies and presenting stage shows, and this was during its movie years. And I really remember being utterly bored and unamused by what was on the screen. The Great Race was advertised as "The Greatest Comedy of All Time!" and was dedicated to Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy.
If you start there, you'd better be damn funny…and I didn't think it was damn or even darn funny. The sheer money that was spent — huge crowd scenes, spectacular machinery, vast scenery, etc. — also raised a bar I felt the picture didn't clear. And long? The entire movie allegedly runs 160 minutes but I'd swear we went into the Pantages on a Sunday afternoon and didn't get out 'til late Tuesday evening.
But as I change, so do a lot of my tastes. I no longer like Snickers bars and I no longer dislike The Great Race. Matter of fact, I see it now — as I did the other night thanks to TCM's Natalie Wood festival — and I think, "Why didn't I like this just for Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk?" It's also got Natalie Wood in her underwear, which is always nice to see. I sat through Penelope because it had Natalie Wood in her underwear for about nine seconds.
It's not a great comedy but it's well-made with some fine performances and I think it simply plays better on the small screen than it did at the Pantages. I especially like Mr. Lemmon playing Wile E. Coyote. I'll try to tell you the next time it's on so you can catch it…or if you can't wait, there's a DVD for six and a half bucks.
For now, I thought I'd share two oddments about the movie, one being the poster above. Every so often, you see advertising for a movie that makes it seem like the promo people said, "Okay, we've got to convince the public this is a different kind of movie than it really is!" The Great Race is a broad slapstick comedy set around the turn of the century with everyone in period costuming and Jack Lemmon — a pretty big star at the time — playing a decidedly unLemmon-ish role behind a sinister mustache.
And now here's a poster that makes him look like he did in all his earlier hits…and I don't think the photos of Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood are from The Great Race, either. Doesn't this make you think it's a sexy, contemporary comedy about a love triangle involving the three stars? This trailer for the film also starts by reminding you how much you love its leads doing what they usually do, then it proceeds to tell us about twelve too many times how funny the movie is. They wouldn't have had to do that if they hadn't cut the scenes in this trailer so as to drain most of the humor out of them…
Second oddment. There's a rousing march that's played about eighty-three times during the movie and you heard some of it if you just watched the trailer. I never stopped to really listen to it before this last viewing. You can hear it in the video below and you'll probably be faster than I was to realize what's interesting about it so I might as well tell you. I have no inside info on this but I'm betting someone said to Henry Mancini, "We want something like a patriotic march" and he said, "Okay…I'll steal about four bars from each of the five or six great American patriotic songs that weren't written by Irving Berlin and weave them all together." And I think that's how he wrote "The Great Race March." How many can you name?