Blake Edwards Films | Blake Edwards Filmography | Blake Edwards Biography | Blake Edwards Career | Blake Edwards Awards

Blake Edwards is one of the few filmmakers from the late classical period of American movies (the late 1940s and 1950s) to survive and prosper through the 1980s. If anything, Edwards's work has deepened with the passing decades, though it no longer bears much resemblance to the norms and styles of contemporary Hollywood. Edwards is an isolated figure, but a vital one.

Edwards's critical and box office reputation first peaked in the early 1960s with such films as Operation Petticoat, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Days of Wine and Roses, and The Pink Panther. But as the new, post-studio Hollywood moved away from his brand of classicism, Edwards had a string of commercial disappointments?What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, Gunn, The Party?leading up to the total failure of the multi-million dollar musical Darling Lili. In the early 1970s, Edwards was barely visible, issuing occasional programmers?The Wild Rovers, The Carey Treatment, The Tamarind Seed?until he decided to revive the Inspector Clouseau character for The Return of the Pink Panther.

The mordant slapstick of the Panther films was back in style, and Edwards rode the success of Return through three more sequels, with the promise (despite the death of Clouseau's interpreter, Peter Sellers) of more to come. The success of the Panther films allowed Edwards to capitalize more personal projects, one of which, 1979's 10, became a sleeper hit. In his sixties, he again became a brand name, with his own production company (Blake Edwards Entertainment) and a measure of security.

For all his artistic independence, Edwards has always chosen to work within well-defined, traditional genres?the musical, the melodrama, the slapstick farce, the thriller. There is little continuity in tone between a film like The Tamarind Seed (a transcendent love story) and S.O.B. (a frenzied black farce), yet there are the more important continuities of personality. Edwards has no particular commitment to any single genre (though his greatest successes have been comedies); he varies his choices as a painter varies the colors of his palette, to alter the tonal mix. The single stylistic constant has been Edwards's use of Panavision; with very few exceptions, his films have used the widescreen format as the basic unit of organization and expression.

At their most elemental level, Edwards's films are about space?crossing it, filling it, transcending it. In his comedies, the widescreen space becomes a vortex fraught with perils?hidden traps, aggressive objects, spaces that abruptly open onto other, unexpected spaces. Edwards extends the principles of silent comedy into modern technology and modern absurdism; his comic heroes are isolated in the hostile widescreen space, unable to conquer it as Chaplin and Keaton could conquer the more manageable dimensions of the silent frame. (Though the Panther films employ this principle, Edwards's masterpiece in this vein is the relatively unknown 1968 film, The Party.)

Visually, Edwards's thrillers appear to be more dense, more furnished, more confining than his comedies (and two of the best of them, Gunn and Experiment in Terror, were photographed in the standard screen ratio); the threat comes not from empty space, but from the crowding of objects, colors, surfaces?the hard, cold thingness of things. This deathly solidity gives way, when the surfaces dissolve, to a more deathly chaos. In the romances, that operative space is the space between the characters; it must be collapsed, transformed, overcome. In Darling Lili, a room full of red roses is an emblem of love; it is not the trite symbolism of the flowers that gives the image its power, but the complete filling in of the widescreen space, its emotional conquest. In The Tamarind Seed, the lovers' conquest of space entails, as it does in the sublime 1930s romances of Frank Borzage, a conquest of death.

With 10 and Victor/Victoria, Edwards managed to blend the styles and assumptions of his comedies and romances. The strict genre divisions that once ruled his work are broken down, and with their dissolution a new humanism appears. Edwards's 10 uses its long lenses trained on Bo Derek's face (as perfect a blank, deathly surface as any in Edwards's films) to create looming, overlarge images of romantic fantasy. But when Dudley Moore finds his way back to Julie Andrews, Edwards shifts to balanced wide-screen compositions?two lovers occupying the same stable space?which convey images of a realistic, responsible romanticism. Victor/Victoria, with its theatrical metaphors, builds small proscenium spaces for each of its role-playing characters; as the constricting roles are cast off, these isolating spaces give way to an overall openness and warmth. The widescreen space is no longer inherently hostile, but contains the promise of closeness and comfort.

With the exception of That's Life?a clever domestic comedy co-scripted with his analyst?Edwards's recent output has been disappointing. For the most part, he has attempted?and failed?to recycle old material and stale comic formulas.

A perfect case-in-point is Switch, a poor variation of Victor/Victoria, in which a womanizing male is killed by a vengeful conquest and comes back to earth as a member of the opposite sex. Blind Date (about a yuppie on a blind date) and Sunset (in which Tom Mix and Wyatt Earp come together to solve a mystery) featured Bruce Willis in two of his weakest screen roles. Skin Deep is an erratic comedy about a hedonistic writer. Finally, Son of the Pink Panther, with popular Italian comedian Roberto Benigni replacing the late Peter Sellers, was a dreadful picture that quickly vanished after its theatrical release.?DAVE KEHR and AUDREY E. KUPFERBERG