MR. LUCKY

year: 1959—1960
cast: John Vivyan, Ross Martin
creator: Blake Edwards
rating: ***1/2

Most episodes of the one-season-wonder television series directed by creature-feature turned BRADY BUNCH director Jack Arnold, the coolest, most surprising aspect of Blake Edward's MR LUCKY is it takes two complete episodes for the story of an honest gambler running a casino on a boat, three miles away from the law's reach, to establish itself (with the boat!), and without being a two-part pilot with a set-up agenda: Like Edwards' PETER GUNN star Craig Stevens, LUCKY lead John Vivyan is a perfectly good-enough actor for the twists and turns to occur around his well-suited charm. Resembling a Cary Grant b-side (or Lloyd Bochner a-side), he's flanked by a faithful sidekick, Andamo, played by Ross Martin, who'd become famous as another faithful second on WILD WILD WEST. With a fickle Spanish accent that hardly matters anyway, he keeps their combined energy fresh and engaging: along with the usual Blake Edwards wallpaper of gorgeous women, often as unpredictable and spontaneous as the mazy plot-lines in which they're caught: the good episodes serious and breezy while the mediocre entries play semi-comedic (as Mancini scores along jovially) upfront. Either way, at 24 minutes per, LUCKY is great bet. 

SUNSET

year: 1991

cast: Bruce Willis, James Garner, Malcolm McDowell, Dermot Mulroney 

director: Blake Edwards

rating: **

Not bad, not great. James Garner is the real life legendary Marshall Wyatt Earp and Bruce Willis is cowboy actor Tom Mix who is portraying Earp in a movie, and they both get together to solve a murder in old Hollywoodland. Kind of reminiscent of those episodes of "Rockford Files" where Garner teamed up with the classier "prettier" (younger) Tom Selleck, but since there's really no clashing between the REAL cowboy and the FAKE one there's not much chemistry either. It's like watching two friends agreeing upon everything - what's the fun in that? But there are some decent performances and you'll have light fun watching. Bruce Willis is passable doing his ever-charming-reaction acting style and James Garner keeps the ball rolling at a comfortable pace. Although in the end you'll forgot you've seen anything: except maybe cult icon Malcolm McDowell's final moments as a bizarre, classy and then monstrous villain. Overall, it's basically in one eye, out the next.

BLIND DATE

year: 1987

cast: Bruce Willis, Kim Basinger

director: Blake Edwards

rating: *

If you make a comedy where the funniest part is a Rick Dees radio bit played in the background, you're in big, big trouble. This is a tedious rollercoaster ride centering on a blind date between a yuppie (Bruce Willis) and a beautiful woman (Kim Basinger) who gets really weird when she's drunk. Everything goes awry for him while she remains untouched since she has no real purpose but to eventually drive this poor bastard's life down the drain. She has an ex-boyfriend (John Larroquete) who's stalking them and he adds to the chase. This is not only an out-and-out ripoff of Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" but feels like a dull neverending nightmare, one of those where every character exists to annoy you and you can't wake up. Awful. One of the worst movies ever made.

DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES

title: DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
year: 1962
cast: Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick, Jack Klugman
director: Blake Edwards
rating: ***

Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick play a good looking young couple who meet, get married, and then become hopeless drunks, especially Remick who doesn't want to change no matter what. Not bad directing by Blake Edwards and the acting is decent, although it tends to get extremely hammy. And it's funny seeing Jack Lemmon on screen with Jack Klugman, the original "Felix Unger" with the TV "Oscar Madison", but they're not such an odd couple as one is a drunk and the other a recovering drunk/AA sponser, which is what this movie turns out to be: a searing two hour ad for Alcoholics Anonymous.

VICTOR/VICTORIA

year: 1982
rating: **

What a drag, pun intended... but the first hour is okay. Robert Preston is annoying as every single line seems like something from a stage play (his style), but Julie Andrews is interesting as an out-of-work American singer in Paris who, with Preston (her gay friend), ends up posing as a man dressed up as a woman - thus becoming a huge nightclub attraction. James Garner is a bigwig who falls in love with her: first thinking she's a she then finding out she's a him and his manliness is questioned. Once the "relationship" begins with Garner and Andrews, the film goes downhill... Once past the entertaining first half with Andrews and Preston struggling together, everything gets way too muddled. Blake Edwards has so many wheels turning in different directions the vehicle gets stuck in the mud.

SKIN DEEP

year: 1988

rating: **1/2

A scene involving two men running around in a dark room wearing glow-in-the-dark condoms fighting over a girl is quite hilarious and brings back THE PINK PANTHER style of slapstick that made Blake Edwards famous, but the rest of the movie, dealing with a bearded piano-playing playwright who's addicted to sex (John Ritter), is hit-or-miss and often gets weighed down by its own navel-gazing. John Ritter is able to display his subtle pratfalls and dry witty charm and is thoroughly convincing since he's had so much practice playing sex-starved men... although his character is much luckier than his "Jack Tripper" character. Overall it's not too shabby. Ritter fans won't be disappointed.

A FINE MESS

year: 1986

cast: Ted Danson, Howie Mandel, Paul Sorvino

director: Blake Edwards

rating: **

For a bad movie this wasn't THAT awful. A lot of running around and hijinks and pratfalls and all things Blake Edwards. Ted Danson and Howie Mandel make an odd team - sometimes it's not apparent which one is the straight man in the pair. It would seem Mandel would play the goofy sidekick but he's about as smooth with the ladies as Danson, only Danson gets more of them. Ted's basically playing "Sam Malone" on speed. The plot involves... oh who cares about the plot - it's just a screwball comedy sendup of the Laurel and Hardy films and overall is a fairly decent time waster.

SON OF THE PINK PANTHER

title: SON OF THE PINK PANTHER

year: 1993

cast: Robert Benigni, Herbert Lom, Robert Davi

director: Blake Edwards

rating: *

Dud Dud Dud Dumb, Dud Dumb, Dud Dumb Dud Dumb Dud Dumb Dud Dumb Dud Duuuuuumb....

S.O.B.

cast: Richard Mulligan, William Holden, Julie Andrews, Rosanna Arquette

writer/director: Blake Edwards
year: 1980 rating: **

Before "The Player", a film which poked fun at Hollywood films, writers, producers, directors, and how films are made from behind-the-scenes, there was "S.O.B.", a wacky mesh of everything thrown into the pot. There are some good moments, like anything involving Richard Mulligan (as buried lead William Holden futilely attempts to protect him from his own bad choices) as a hit-making director who made a big budget disaster, losing his mind and becoming a suicidal maniac. Writer/director Blake Edwards is making a statement here and I'm still not sure what it is. He has his own wife, Julie Andrews, the queen of G rated musicals, playing an actress who is the queen of G-rated musicals... and she takes off her top in the movie-within-a-movie (being recut by Mulligan's character to redeem itself). Herein lies the parody of a parody, but things get too physical and eventually, though sporadically entertaining, it gets downright tiresome.

10

year: 1979

cast: Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, Bo Derek, Dee Wallace, Brian Dennehy, Sam Jones

writer/director: Blake Edwards

rating: ***

Bo Derek is to this movie what the shark was to JAWS. You see her a few times in the build up and then a lot at the end. A few differences: when Bo's part of the story, the beautiful woman who "completes" the fantasies of songwriting middle aged "George" played by a somewhat buried lead Dudley Moore, things go downhill. Most of this Blake Edwards iconic film belongs to Moore and his subtle physical humor, and is a laidback mesh of clever lines and mellow wit, and the usual apt direction by Blake Edwards, the Hal Ashby of humor: who seems to let things happen on their own accord. If expectations are for Bo running on the beach (like the famous poster): you don't see her much: but there's a lot more to this movie than a perfect "10", it's more about the number "42", the age of the protagonist, and what he goes through to survive it.