Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Return of the Pink Panther,’ As Clouseau Drives His Boss Crazy…Yet Again)

[After a robbery that Inspector Clouseau, talking to a beggar, managed to miss.]

Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus [played by Herbert Lom, left]: “The beggar was the lookout man for the gang.”

Clouseau [played by Peter Sellers, right]: “That is impossible.”

Dreyfus: “Why?”

Clouseau: “He was blind. How can a blind man be a lookout?”

Dreyfus [insinuating Clouseau] “How can an idiot be a policeman? Answer me that!”

Clouseau: “It's very simple, all he has to do is enlist...”

Dreyfus: “Shut up!”— The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), screenplay by Frank Waldman and Blake Edwards, directed by Blake Edwards

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again,’ As Inspector Clouseau Excuses a Disastrous Mishap)

[Inspector Clouseau has accidentally reduced a piano to a pile of splinters.]

Mrs. Leverlilly [played by Vanda Godsell]: “You've ruined that piano!”

Clouseau [played by Peter Sellers]: “What is the price of one piano compared to the terrible crime that's been committed here?”

Mrs. Leverlilly: “But that's a priceless Steinway!”

Clouseau: “Not anymore!”— The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), screenplay by Frank Waldman and Blake Edwards, directed by Blake Edwards

Movie Quote of the Day (‘A Shot in the Dark,’ With an Unusual Deduction by Clouseau)

Commissioner Dreyfus [played by Herbert Lom]: “What about the maid?

Inspector Jacques Clouseau [played by Peter Sellers]:“The maid?”

Dreyfus: “Was he jealous of her, too? He strangled her.”

Clouseau: “It is possible that his intended victim was a man and that he made a mistake.”

Dreyfus [incredulous]: “A mistake?... in a nudist camp?”

Clouseau: “Nobody's perfect.”

Dreyfus: “Idiot nincompoop lunatic!”—A Shot in the Dark (1964), screenplay by Blake Edwards and William Peter Blatty, based on the stage play by Harry Kurnitz from the play L’idtiote by Marcel Achard, directed by Blake Edwards

Flashback, October 1979: Bo a Big-Office ‘10’

It might have been Oktoberfest in bars around the U.S., but, with her improbable cornrow hairdo and jog toward the camera in a revealing one-piece swimsuit, 22-year-old Bo Derek turned the nation’s box offices into a jigglefest in her first major film role, in the Warner Brothers release 10, premiering 35 years ago this week.

The film popularized the notion of a woman so hot that, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 the highest, she rates the latter number. (Ironically, in the movie Derek’s character is considered so sexy that even this numbering system is deemed inadequate to summarize her charms, so she is accorded an 11.)

The tidal wave of publicity associated with that designation did more than make Ms. Derek the sex symbol of that moment. It also:

* catapulted the film to #1 at the U.S. box office its opening weekend, and among the top grossing movies of the year;

*it turned the favorite lovemaking accompaniment for Ms. Derek’s character, Jenny—Maurice Ravel’s Bolero—into one of the most requested bits of music on classical music stations, a distinction it contains to hold (see this prior post of mine on the piece's 1928 premiere);

*it transformed the short, hilarious Dudley Moore—who, the year before, had stolen Foul Play out from under Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn—from a quirky supporting actor into an unorthodox leading man;

*it built name recognition, in a small but well-acted role, for character actor Brian Dennehy; and

*it allowed writer-director Blake Edwards, in the last dozen years of his film career, to project his own raging private anxieties onto a series of male protagonists who were in conflict with themselves.

Derek might be regarded as America’s answer to France’s Brigitte Bardot. Consider the following similarities:

*Both blondes were stamped indelibly as sex symbols for the rest of their lives at age 22 (in the case of Bardot, by the 1956 movie And God Created Woman).

'*Both were largely the creation of cinematic Svengalis better known for relations with three stunning women who became their wives or lovers than for their own, limited talent. The title of the memoir of director Roger Vadim spoke (unintended) volumes about his influence on world cinema: Bardot Deneuve Fonda. For similar reasons, John Derek, an actor whose last good film had been two decades before 10, might have styled the reminiscence he never got to write Andress Evans (Bo) Derek.

*Both women, after a relatively short filmography, retired and became animal-rights advocates.

*Both women dismayed the more liberal members of their nation’s cinema communities by backing right-wing causes. Within the last decade, Derek supported the candidacy of Republican George W. Bush. Bardot’s known foreign-policy views were a good deal more extreme, leading her to be fined 12,000 euros in 2007 for inciting racial hatred for complaining that Muslims were “destroying our country by imposing their ways."

(For the seismic effect that the French sex kitten--she should have trademarked the phrase!--had more than 20 years before 10 on young American males, I urge you to read novelist and occasional blogger Peter’s Quinn’s hilarious post, “Vive Brigitte Bardot!”)

All of this lay in the future, however. In the late Seventies, after scouting coffee shops, talent agencies, little theaters, model agencies, even a fashion show for the personification of feminine beauty for his next film, Edwards met Ms. Derek, at the urging of her husband. Edwards remembered: "Her first words, when she came in to read for us, were: 'I'm sorry about wasting your time.’...Meanwhile, [co-producer] 'Tony Adams' and I were crossing our fingers and praying: 'Let her be able to act—please let her be able to act!'"

Sorry, I must have missed something in that last sentence. The implication seems to be that Ms. Derek won out over a number of other candidates (reportedly including Christie Brinkley and Kim Basinger) because of her talent to emote. Now, from what I’ve heard, she seems to be a nice enough woman, and maybe even relatively intelligent. (I’ve always thought that Joan Rivers’ crack—“She’s so dumb that when she saw a sign saying, ‘Wet floor,' she did”—was cruel.) But, for all that she has shown onscreen (and that’s plenty), acting ability is not one of her assets.

Considering the irony that permeated so many of his films (notably, his Hollywood satire S*O*B), Edwards could have been putting on his interviewer. On the other hand, maybe he was simply displaying old-fashioned gallantry to a woman who, whatever her shortcomings, deserved a thousand times less opprobrium than the sexist pigs who ran the studios and who had been making Edwards’ life miserable.

In this case, Edwards turned out to be considerably shrewder about what would work at the box office and with critics than studio heads. On the one hand, he knew how to lure into theaters guys who would salivate endlessly at Ms. Derek (including a friend of mine—AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!!!).

On the other hand, just below the surface of a bedroom farce that the French could have enjoyed thoroughly, was a far more subdued, rueful comedy, shot through with melancholy, about a man in full-blown personal and professional midlife crisis. In his professional accomplishments—notably, several Oscars for his songs—Moore’s George Webber sounds superficially like the man who had contributed magnificently to so many Edwards films, Henry Mancini. 

But, in his increasing sense that time might be slipping away from him—a fog of depression so thick that even a psychiatrist is of little use—George is a seriocomic version of Edwards himself. (The final three films in the Pink Panther series had given Edwards what Hollywood worships above all else—the golden touch—but had also given him major agita in the form of star Peter Sellers, who wore the director out with constant arguments and all-around derangement.) Edwards is the only writer-director I’ve ever heard who listed his psychiatrist as a co-screenwriter on a film (That’s Life!, in 1986).

Few if any reviewers remarked on this autobiographical element at the time, the way they would that year with Bob Fosse (All That Jazz), Woody Allen (Manhattan), and David Steinberg (who, in the bomb Something Short of Paradise, not only parsed his own story, as a Jewish comedian obsessed with old films, but Allen’s similar persona, in Manhattan and Annie Hall). The fact that critics overlooked it had much to do with the felicitous casting of Moore, who came on board during shooting when George Segal left (reportedly because the latter thought the role of Julie Andrews, Edwards’ wife and frequent leading lady, was being built up at his expense). Now, Edwards was able to use an inspired farceur, as well as a piano player of considerable talent who, in an extended solo, made the fundamentally autumnal mood of this material unmistakably apparent to audiences.

As notoriously documented in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the 1970s had transformed America into a Disneyworld writ large for sexual experimentation. But, like the theme park, it catered overwhelmingly to the young. 

The loneliness of those left on the fringes because of age is depicted repeatedly in 10—in George, who becomes a peeping tom, low-grade stalker, and adulterer in his foolhardy pursuit of Derek’s character, a bride named Jenny; George’s gay songwriting collaborator, bitterly aware that he won’t be able to hold onto his younger lover for much longer; and George’s level-headed, age-appropriate lover Samantha (played by Andrews), who fumes as she waits for her boyfriend to give up his oafish quest for a woman who can make him feel young again. The movie was, as Nathan Rabin noted as part of the series “Forgotbusters” for the Website “The Dissolve," “simultaneously a perfect sociological document of the era that created it, and strangely timeless in its obsessions.”

Edwards would go on to write and/or direct a series of highly personal films, over the next dozen years, about male characters deeply conflicted and insecure: The Man Who Loved Women (an adaptation of the Francois Truffaut film), That’s Life!, Skin Deep and Switch (a conflict worsened in the last of these by the fact that womanizing Jimmy Smits, murdered by ex-girlfriends, is reincarnated as a woman).

The barrel-chested, fortysomething Dennehy couldn’t be less like the voluptuous Derek. But I couldn’t write this post without mentioning the veteran character actor, who used his few minutes of screen time to make a notable impression as a sympathetic bartender. It was the first in a series of roles that incrementally raised his profile in the entertainment industry, to the point where he is now one of the giants of the American stage.

In 1989, Moore and Derek reunited to present the Oscar for Best Costume Design—an occasion, the award show’s writers not-so-subtly reminded the audience, that was 10 years after their hit. He seemed to recall playing opposite someone who looked like her, Moore said with a straight face: “How odd that the mind plays tricks. Would that the body could as well!”

In the end, Edwards’ film conveyed the wisdom that when it came to relations with women, male emotional health consisted in accepting the fact that it was better that the body not play the tricks once (seemingly) within reach, and that a dream girl might not necessarily provide the goal of life: love.

This Day in Film History (‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ Drama of Addiction, Opens)

December 26, 1962—Days of Wine and Roses, perhaps the most searing drama about alcoholism put on the big screen since The Lost Weekend, opened just before a new year in which, once again, all too many people would get drunk in more than just a silly way—and in which far too few would decide that somehow, they must start their lives all over again, like Jack Lemmon’s public-relations man, Joe Clay.

Like The Lost Weekend, Days of Wine and Roses expanded the repertoires of its male star (Ray Milland, in the case of the former, and Lemmon) and directors (Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards, respectively) far beyond the comedies for which they had been primarily known. And, like that earlier film’s Don Birnam, the predicament of Joe Clay hinges on a relationship with women.

Well, in the case of The Lost Weekend, sort of. Jane Wyman’s warmly sympathetic magazine researcher could set Birnam right, maybe, if only he could open his eyes. Then again, maybe not. The original source of the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script, a novel by Charles Jackson, implied strongly that Birnam’s chemical addiction—and larger depression—traced back to a homosexual affair in college. With such subject matter verboten on the big screen before the Sixties, the best that Wilder and Brackett could do was drop hints about Birnam’s orderly (played by Frank Faylen) at the hospital, and to use the failed writer’s genteel artistic background and massive case of writer's block as code for lack of male virility.

Days of Wine and Roses is, on the other hand, unmistakably a love story between a man and woman, albeit one with a twist. Take the bowler hat that Lemmon wears in the photo accompanying this post. Fans of his most significant prior film, The Apartment (1960), would have recognized that little bit of stage business as the same one that junior-executive-on-the make Chuck Baxter tries out in front of the girl of his dreams, Fran Kubelik.

To his regret, Lemmon was offered the role of Clay onscreen rather than the man who had played the part originally in the 1957 teleplay by J. P. Miller, good friend, Cliff Robertson, whom producers felt did not provide sufficient box-office pull. Some critics have suggested that Robertson, Piper Laurie, and TV director John Frankenheimer created a grittier drama than the one on which Lemmon, Lee Remick and film director Blake Edwards collaborated.

But the comedy backgrounds of Lemmon and Edwards (he had done Breakfast at Tiffany’s the year before) served the film extremely well, I think. The opening scenes between Lemmon and Remick, typified by that bowler hat, look like they’re going to start a rather traditional rom-com, with the protagonists meeting cute. But they pull you in and seduce you, the way alcohol does in this film. We think we’re about to watch Pillow Talk, but instead we get Scenes From an Alcoholic Marriage. (The initial shock of that was such that there were a virtually unheard-of number of walkouts at a preview for the film. Studio execs were sure they had a disaster on their hands until someone remembered that the audience hadn't been told beforehand that they would be watching a drama--and a particularly devastating one, at that.)

Lemmon’s Clay begins by getting Remick’s Kirsten Arnasen, a teetotaling secretary with an endearing sweet tooth, to share his good times by trying a Brandy Alexander (with a doubly intoxicating mixture of brandy and creme de cocoa). By the middle of the film, she fully shares what has become his full-fledged addiction. By the film’s pull-no-punches ending, the intensity of her addiction is so bad that his only hope of extricating himself is to break away from her, no matter how much it hurts. (That is the blunt message delivered by Clay's sponsor, who, as I indicated in a post from earlier today, was played by the late, great Jack Klugman.)

The attractiveness of Lemmon and Remick is essential to keeping viewers’ interest through the rest of the film. Their characters, after all, end up doing unsavory, degrading things for the sake of the booze that becomes part of their “threesome.” This is what part of what Kim Morgan has in mind in her film blog, Sunset Gun, when she writes:

“Lemmon and Remick's most interesting characteristic is, sadly, that they are alcoholics. They can't indulge the brilliant mental gymnastics of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's George and Martha, whose addiction and spitefulness are, in a highly dysfunctional way, disarmingly romantic and strangely heroic. Lee and Jack -- they're like a lot of people -- just regular old drunks. No wonder they drink.”

That lack of “mental gymnastics” is precisely why the humor and vivacity that Lemmon and Remick carry from their prior work is so necessary in this film. Without the sympathy generated in those opening scenes before the marriage of Joe and Kirsten, it is questionable if viewers would root for them to find a way out of their predicament.

As it turned out, many people did. In addition to a win for Best Song (the title tune, by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini), the film garnered nominations for Lemmon, Remick, best art direction and best costume design. (Inexplicably, it was edged out of a Best Picture nomination by the likes of Mutiny on the Bounty and The Music Man.) It was also named one of the best 400 films by the American Film Institute.

Several years ago, on a long flight back from California, I spoke with a lawyer who, despite (or, I have thought sometimes since, because of) his completely drink-besotted state, knew every word in the film’s Oscar-winning title song. Had he been alive to see it, that might have made lyricist Mercer smile at first—before he realized that this highly intelligent, charming, literate man not only shared his most humane qualities, but also his thirst for drink.

(Incidentally, nearly three decades after the film, Lemmon shocked an Inside the Actors Studio audience with his first public admission that he also—like Mercer and Miller--had been an alcoholic, offscreen as well as on.)

As with The Lost Weekend, many viewers of Days of Wine and Roses are likely to recall one scene as particularly memorable in depicting the desperate state of an alcoholic: Birnam’s Sunday search for a pawnshop where he can get enough money for a drink, versus Clay’s trashing of his father-in-law’s greenhouse in search of a bottle he firmly believes is there. Yet for me, one other scene in the Edwards film has left a much more shattering, enduring impression.

Years ago, a female friend recalled, virtually word for word, these lines from Remick toward the end, when she explains why giving up alcohol has become so difficult: “This is the way I look when I'm sober. It's enough to make a person drink, wouldn't you say? You see, the world looks so dirty to me when I'm not drinking. Joe, remember Fisherman's Wharf? The water when you looked too close? That's the way the world looks to me when I'm not drinking.”

So often when I think of my friend, those lines come to mind. Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen the film since she recalled that bit of telling dialogue: It hurts me too much to think of it.

This Day in Film History (Hepburn, “Last True Innocent” of Hollywood, Lights Up “Tiffany’s”)

October 5, 1961—As she had done since her Oscar-winning film debut eight years before in Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn proved positively larcenous on the big screen, stealing into the hearts of critics and audiences in what became one of the best-loved romantic comedies in American film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, premiering on this date at New York's Radio City Music Hall.

Few actors have proven so impervious to the perils of miscasting as Hepburn. It wasn’t simply that she was magnificently talented or that she was thin enough to be a costume designer’s dream. No, audiences sensed—rightly so—that her warmth of heart onscreen was no act. It made them willing to give her a pass on even the most unlikely roles.

If her miscasting was truly misbegotten, as in her portrayal of a half-breed Indian in John Huston’s fascinating but wrongheaded 1960 western The Unforgiven, audiences would blame the director, the producer—anyone but her, even though she had the box-office clout to work with whomever she wanted and, to that extent, control her fate. If the miscasting was mild, as was Jack L. Warner’s idea of replacing the songstress Tony-winning songstress Julie Andrews with the nonsinging Hepburn in My Fair Lady, filmgoers were more than ready to make allowances.

Breakfast at Tiffany's belonged more to the second category. The 1958 Truman Capote novella on which it was based made no bones about the jagged edges of protagonist Holly Golightly: her profession (the world’s oldest), her substance abuse, her abortion, even, in those far more buttoned-up times, her flirtation with bisexuality. Capote had Marilyn Monroe in mind for the role, and he was not thrilled when the gamine Hepburn was offered it instead of Hollywood’s prototypical blond bombshell.

Audiences might not have had the chance to see Hepburn at all in the now-famous Givenchy little black dress. Time Magazine’s quick summary of Holly Golightly—an “expense-account tramp”—crystallized Hepburn's fears of how her acceptance of such a role would fly into audience’s perceptions of her. When the idea was first pitched, neither she nor her husband at the time, the puritanical, controlling Mel Ferrer, wanted any part of it. “You have such a wonderful script,” she said simply, “but I can’t play a hooker.” The line that changed her mind came from producer Marty Jurow: “We don’t want to make a movie about a hooker; we want to make a movie about a dreamer of dreams.”

That anecdote, and dozens of other fascinating and delightful ones, comes from a slim little book that came out last year: Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, by Sam Wasson. If you can overlook the book’s inexplicable, even infuriating lack of an index, you’ll consistently learn something new and unexpected about a movie that, for all its surface fun, was no day at the beach to get filmed, especially because of the revolutionary way it depicted sex in a romantic comedy.

Jurow was able to produce his film about “a dreamer of dreams” by slipping its more risqué aspects past the censors. In those last years before today's ratings system, Hollywood's Production Code Administration,though increasingly challenged by filmmakers, still held considerable sway over what could be shown or even implied onscreen. And so, screenwriter George Axelrod employed a trick that had worked like a charm for Alfred Hitchcock,among others: the art of indirection.

Here’s how it worked: you kept the censor’s eye off the scene you really wanted in the picture by offering up a dummy target, another scene you had no intention at all of filming. John Michael Hayes’ script for To Catch a Thief included a scene in which male characters gawk over one of those naughty French postcards. It distracted the attention of Hollywood’s censorship office from the scene that Hitchcock knew would really get people talking about his film: the passionate clinch between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, set against a background of nocturnal fireworks—a visual metaphor for sex if there ever was one.

Similarly, Axelrod knew that the censors would be primed to look out for anything involving Holly Golightly. The movie, after all, revolved around her. Even the famous opening scene, with her looking in the windows of Tiffany’s just around sunrise, could raise eyebrows: What could a woman be doing in a dress like that at that ungodly hour?

So Axelrod had the censors, as it were, take their eyes off the ball by directing their attention to the character of Paul, Holly's homosexual friend in the novella but her eventual lover in the film. Axelrod invented a character not in the book—a rich, middle-aged woman nicknamed 2E (for her apartment number), played by Patricia Neal—who employed Paul as her gigolo.

The filmmakers--including director Blake Edwards, making his first important movie--also got the censors and the public not to think too much about the implications of, say, Holly constantly going around, at all hours of the night, with a lot of strange men, by stressing that she was “a kook.” With Hepburn in the role, that became lovable kook.

The chapter on Audrey Hepburn in director-critic Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell's in It: Portraits and Conversations reads like an extended love letter to this star of his film They All Laughed. What may be the best and truest line in this section is: “in the final full decade of the golden age of movies, Audrey Hepburn became the last true innocent of the American screen.” It echoes a quote in Wasson's book from Edwards, gently putting off any questions about a relationship between himself and his star: “In those days, everyone fell in love with Audrey.”

Back to that Jurow quote about Holly being a “dreamer of dreams.” It’s reinforced onscreen, unforgettably, in the Oscar-winning song “Moon River.” Henry Mancini’s music establishes the wistful tone, but it’s Johnny Mercer’s lyrics that bring this to concise but certain life.

Among the select group of men (and even fewer women) behind the Great American Songbook, only Mercer had the rural background to help him identify with the runaway from Tulip, Texas. A transplant from Savannah, he stood a bit apart from urban natives such as the Gershwins, Arlen, Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein. “Moon River” could easily complement “Skylark” in a cabaret act, as both, in conveying intense, wistful longing, evoke the country: a “meadow in a mist” in “Skylark,” “my huckleberry friend” in “Moon River.” (After toying with the names of other rivers, Mercer came up with the name of this one by finding it on a map.)

Amazingly enough, after a preview which seemed to indicate the film was running too long, a studio head broached the idea of cutting the song. Jurow's producing partner, Richard Shepherd, vowed that it would be over his dead body. The tune stayed, allowing everyone concerned to bask in its glow on Oscar night, when it won Best Song for Mancini and Mercer.

There is one blemish on the film: Mickey Rooney’s ridiculous, cartoonish portrayal of Holly’s Japanese neighbor. But nothing and nobody is perfect, and movie fans like myself love Breakfast at Tiffany’s despite that. In fact, we’re hooked from the opening credits, as you will be, too, if you watch this YouTube clip.

I’ve stressed a great deal here the ways in which Hollywood’s Holly differed from Capote’s. But in one special way, it stayed true to an important theme not only of the novella, but also of Capote’s entire work: in the words of A Separate Peace author John Knowles, when interviewed for George Plimpton’s oral history of Capote, that “there are special, strange, gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding.”

It might be a bit odd to end a post about a classic movie by writing about its literary source, but I have no compunction about doing so. The Holly Golightly of Hepburn, Edwards and Axelrod is so engraved in our memories that reading the original will not dislodge the cinematic version in any manner. The following passage from Capote’s small gem modulates skillfully from a beautiful description of an October day in Central Park to the author’s forever-melancholy recognition that rootless dreamers and free spirits are prone to what Holly calls “the mean reds”--i.e., depression:

We ate lunch at the cafeteria in the park. Afterwards, avoiding the zoo (Holly said she couldn’t bear to see anything in a cage), we giggled, ran, sang along the paths towards the old wooden boathouse, now gone. Leaves floated on the lake; on the shore, a park-man was fanning a bonfire of them, and the smoke, rising like Indian signals, was the only smudge on the quivering air. Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring; which is how I felt sitting with Holly on the railings of the boathouse porch. I thought of the future, and spoke of the past. Because Holly wanted to know about my childhood. She talked of her own, too; but it was elusive, nameless, placeless, an impressionistic recital, though the impression received was contrary to what one expected, for she gave an almost voluptuous account of swimming and summer, Christmas trees, pretty cousins, and parties: in short, happy in a way that she was not, and never, certainly, the background of a child who had run away.