The Great Race (1965) - film review

The Great Leslie is a dashing daredevil who delights in performing stunts for an appreciative audience, circa 1900.  An avid self-publicist, he persuades the manufacturers of a new make of automobile to stage a great race from New York to Paris.  Leslie’s arch-enemy, Professor Fate, also enters the race, determined to thwart his long-time rival.  Another entrant is suffragette journalist Maggie Dubois, who intends to win the race to strike a blow for female emancipation.  Assisted by his accomplice Max, Professor Fate soon manages to eliminate all the other contestants, ensuring that the great race will become a duel between him and his nemesis Leslie...

The Great Race typifies the kind of brash blockbuster adventure comedy that was fleetingly popular with audiences in the mid-1960s.  At the time, Hollywood producers seemed to think that all they had to do to have a surefire hit was to burn up sackloads of cash and get some seriously big name actors to do some very silly things in front of a camera.  The fallacy of this strategy was exposed when The Great Race bombed at the box office and attracted far from favourable reviews.  Badly scripted and directed with no real flair, this probably rates as Blake Edwards’ least funny comedy.

It’s not hard to see why the film was so badly received: its ramshackle plot barely sustains its near-three hour runtime and the humour is pretty well exhausted in the first fifteen minutes.  The paucity of ideas becomes apparent within the first hour but attains truly nightmarish proportions when, for purely time-filling reasons, the screenwriters shoehorn in a tacky version of The Prisoner of Zenda just before the ending.  The film is messy, overlong and overblown, and painfully lacking in humour.  Its only saving grace is Jack Lemmon’s outrageously over-the-top pantomime villain, who, partnered with Peter Falk in what now looks like a Dastardly and Muttley tribute act, gives the film’s its only decent laughs.  Had this been trimmed to about ninety minutes, it might just have worked.  As it is, it is almost as hard to get through as War in Peace, and not nearly as funny.

© Derek Adamson 2010

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