The Great Race

Blake Edwards's 1965 epic comedy and tribute to silent-movie serials stars Tony Curtis as chivalrous, chauvinistic hero The Great Leslie, and Jack Lemmon as his dastardly, flamboyantly mustachioed nemesis, Professor Fate, a daredevil who—with the help of his loyal but dim henchman, Maximilian Meen (Peter Falk)—tries to sabotage Leslie at every turn (with consistently disastrous results). The rivals (with Curtis always clad in gleaming white and Lemmon in menacing black) engage in a car race from New York to Paris (they float across from Alaska to Russia on an ice floe), while suffragette newspaperwoman Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood) joins them, first as a racing competitor and then as a traveling companion. Always a fan of physical comedy and elaborate visual gags, Edwards delivers the slapstick here as self-aware nostalgia, with lavish re-creations (from barnstorming biplanes to an Old West saloon and a Russian castle), Rube Goldberg schemes, and comic brawls, the last of which is a massive cream-pie fight in a castle kitchen. While The Great Race doesn't have the star-studded cast of Stanley Kramer's earlier It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, it is a similarly sprawling madcap epic (running nearly three hours). Bowing on Blu-ray with a beautiful transfer from a restored Technicolor master of the complete Road Show version (also including the original overture, en'tracte, and exit sequences), extras include an archival behind-the-scenes featurette. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)