Push the button, Max!!

So here we are, stuck at home, and in dire need of ANYthing that can keep us entertained and force our brains to think about ANYthing other than the world around us. I’ve seen so many people posting on various social media platforms, begging for suggestions of things to watch, other than genuinely weird people who may or may not have fed their spouses to tigers.

Well, folks, if you will allow me the honor, I’m gonna offer some entertainment suggestions that might help you out…

So, without further ado, welcome to The Quarantine Film Festival!

Now, before we go on, I will put this out there for everyone. These films will be from every genre, every sub-genre, and from all over the globe. There will be family fun, there will be thought-provoking titles, there will be horror, thriller, comedy, drama, and, yes, even musical suggestions. I must confess, I’m a film fan (if not fanatic…). I love the medium of film and do consider it an art form. Film has an undeniable way of transporting a viewer to worlds beyond the normal realm. Very few other art forms have the power to make you laugh uncontrollably, weep openly, and hide your eyes while peeking through your fingers, and that, folks, is, indeed, a power like no other.

But we can go further into all that later. Let’s get to the heart of the matter, shall we?

We’re going to start this off with a movie I first saw back when I was about 12 years old, and instantly became a fan of. Starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk, and Natalie Wood, the film is called The Great Race.

In a nutshell, the movie is about rival thrill-seeking daredevils in the early era of automobile production being participants in an auto race from New York to Paris. The ever-heroic, white-suited hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) has dreamed up this race to prove to the world that the fictitious auto manufacturer, Webber Motor Cars, manufactures the best cars in the world. The black-suited, Snidley Whiplash-mustache-wearing villain, Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), Leslie’s longtime rival, has built a supercar that can defeat all comers, complete with smoke-screen capabilities, a cannon, and a heat ray (look out, James Bond!), and he makes it his life goal to defeat Leslie once and for all. The beautiful Natalie Wood plays Maggie DuBois, a sufferagette and would-be reporter joins the race to prove women are equal to men in every way. Peter Falk plays Max, Professor Fate’s long-suffering henchman.

This movie is directed by Blake Edwards, who was just making his name as a slapstick comedy director. He was fresh off two outings with Inspector Clouseau, The Pink Panther and A Shot in The Dark, and he pulls no punches with this movie. If there is a joke or cliché to use in a comedy film, Edwards uses it, and uses it to the best possible result. He lets Curtis become the epitome of the word “hero,” down to sparkling eyes and blinding smile. He also lets Lemmon run free with every stereotypical “bad guy” trope, from maniacal laugh to wild-eyed glare, and it all works perfectly.

Even the supporting cast shines in this movie. The veteran actor Keenan Wynn plays Leslie’s butler/mechanic/assistant Hezikiah Sturdy (yes.. his last name is “Sturdy…), a man who would rather work on cars than breathe and eat. Ross Martin, of Wild Wild West fame, plays Baron Von Schtuppe, a traitorous leader of a lot to overthrow the royal family of the country of Potsdorf (which we will get to in a moment), and Larry Storch and Dorothy Provine play Texas Jack and Lily Olay, citizens of the Old Western town of Boracho, just to name a few. But, more than anyone else, it is Jack Lemmon himself who provides one of the best supporting roles as he does double duty, playing the soon-to-be-crowned king of Potsdorf, Prince Frederick Hoepnick. Because of the prince’s (obviously) amazing resemblance to Professor Fate, Baron Von Schtuppe enlists Fate to take the prince’s place for the ceremony that will crown him as king, to which Fate would quietly abdicate the throne and leave the Baron to rule the country.

Look, I am not gonna sit here and tell you The Great Race is a classic movie to rival Gone With The Wind or Citizen Kane. It’s not. What The Great Race WILL do, though, is make you laugh for almost three hours. It’s what Edwards does best – take a relatively simple subject and work every possible bit of humor into every moment of screen time. There are sight gags, puns, and slapstick routines that work from every possible era of Hollywood. There’s an entire subplot about the suffragette movement, involving women’s rights to work at jobs men normally controlled in the time the movie is set, featuring the always-wonderful Arthur O’Connell and Marvin Kaplan as the publisher and assistant publisher of the newspaper DuBois manages to get a job with, and Vivian Vance as the publisher’s wife, also a suffragette and friend of DuBois. We get swordfights and saloon fights and “foreign intrigue” and a “battle to survive the Alaskan wilderness,” a love story, and, yes, a car race, all blended into one great movie comedy.

At times like this, when all the news is just mind-numbingly humorless, turn off the reality and find The Great Race. It’s two hours and fifty minutes of pure escapism in a time when escape is absolutely not a bad thing. To hell with “reality” programming about rednecks feeding one another to tigers and rich bitches in California trying to pretend they are normal people. Put The Great Race on for a while, and just enjoy the feeling of being able to laugh out loud for a while!

The Great Race is available on Amazon Prime video for $1.99, and, trust me when I say, you will get our money’s worth out of it!