Great Race, The

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The early to mid sixties were good years for big-screen, super-long, blockbuster comedy epics. The era brought us not only "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines," but 1965's "The Great Race." Directed by a fellow who was already an old hand at comedy, Blake Edwards ("Breakfast at Tiffany's," "The Pink Panther"), and starring two actors only a half dozen years off their success together in "Some Like It Hot," Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, "The Great Race" is a boisterous, madcap chase film that overstays its welcome but provides enough laughs along the way to make up for its shortcomings. Moreover, its handsome new DVD transfer goes a long way to ensure we keep awake.

Part parody and part farce, the movie is based on an actual automobile competition that took place in 1908. But the real race was nothing like this. This one is more like a Road Runner/Wiley Coyote cartoon, with old-time heroes to cheer and old-time villains to hiss. Curtis plays the hero, of course, and what a hero he is! His name is Leslie Gallant III, "The Great Leslie" to the public, and he's a daredevil entertainer, part aviator, part aerialist, part speed racer. He wows the crowds with his hair-raising antics. But that's not the best part: He's so pure his teeth sparkle. He dresses in all white; even his accessories and baggage are white.

Naturally, for every pure-hearted hero we need an equally dastardly villain, and this is Lemmon as Professor Fate. Dressed entirely in black, with requisite curly black mustache, Fate is evil incarnate. Fortunately, he's also "stupid" incarnate, so like the hapless Coyote of cartoon fame, poor Fate's every maneuver to foil his arch-rival, Leslie, ends in disaster for the perpetrator. Cackling wildly as his rocket railroad takes off unexpectedly into the air, for instance, Fate's every move backfires. To say that Lemmon steals the show is an understatement. What's more, Fate's assistant, Max, played by Peter Falk, is almost as funny as he is. Waiting on Fate hand and foot and being just a mite less clever (but a mite more pragmatic) than his master, Max makes a perfect second-banana fall guy. Every time Fate tells Max to push a button, look for the worst to happen to the both of them.

The story idea is the brainchild of director Edwards, and he divided his narrative into three segments. Section one is the most inventively comical, showing us the continual warfare between Fate and Leslie; section two is the first half of the race itself; section three is on the last leg of the race, a European court intrigue along the lines of Anthony Hope's Romance novel, "The Prisoner of Zenda." It all makes for a very long motion picture at well over two-and-a-half hours, and it must tire even the film's most avid admirers. How long is it? Well, the race itself doesn't even get started until forty-two minutes into the movie! But for the patient, there are rewards.

No cliché or stereotype is left unnoticed, which, I suppose, is why the film goes on for such length. The race is proposed by Leslie as a promotional gimmick for a motorcar company, which builds him a "Leslie Special" to compete in a race from New York to Paris, an unlikely route to say the least. I once had the opportunity to see this vehicle at Harrah's old automobile collection; it was a stunning monster of a car. All white, certainly. Fate builds his own car, an all-black contraption dubbed the "Hannibal Twin-8," with buttons for all sorts of things like an elevated cabin and a cannon mounted in the nose, some of which actually work. Sometimes. Sorta. "Push the button, Max."

Most of the contestants in the race drop out early (thanks to the nefarious Fate) except one: a lady reporter for the New York Sentinel, Maggie DuBois, played by Natalie Wood. She's a women's activist, a suffragette, whose Stanley Steamer breaks down but who tags along with Leslie and Fate, anyway. Besides being beautiful and spunky, she provides the romantic interest in the story, as if you needed to be told.

By the time the race reaches Europe, the viewer is about worn out, but that's where the subplot begins. It concerns the half-witted Crown Prince of Potsdorf, heir to the throne of Carpania, who is an exact double of Prof. Fate (both are played by Lemmon), and a kidnapping and a substitution and, and, and.... It goes on for maybe a half an hour and constitutes a movie within a movie. The most notable thing about it is an exchange between Fate and a Potsdorf General: "Escaped?" exclaims Fate. When the General replies, "With a small friar," Fate's response is, "Leslie escaped with a chicken?" I've remembered that line for close to forty years, and it still makes me smile.

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