These three Blake Edwards-directed movies, though decades old, are repeatedly watchable.
10 is about a hugely successful song writer (Dudley Moore) consumed with middle age angst who temporarily abandons his level-headed, longtime love (Julie Andrews) to pursue to amazing lengths the perfect woman of his fantasies (Bo Derek). Alas, in the flesh, Bo turns out to be totally Bo-ring. The wildly farcical
S.O.B.(Standard Operating Bullshit) is about a hugely successful film director (Richard Mulligan) whose monumental box office flop drives him to four unsuccessful (and very funny) suicide attempts. In a burst of creativity, he figures out how to re-edit the nursery rhymish film starring his ex-wife (Julie Andrews) into a soft porno in which she bares her boobs for the first time in her career. (Scuttlebutt at the time was the film was Edwards' F.U. to Hollywood for typecasting Andrews, his real-life wife, as a perennial virgin, and there are many "in" references to this throughout,)
THAT’S LIFE! is about a hugely successful architect (Jack Lemmon) whose middle-age hypochondria blinds him to his wife's (Andrews) truly serious medical crisis. As was Lemmon's specialty, he makes laugh and cry, sometimes in the same scene. What these films have in common, besides their wealthy, successful main characters, is a peek at Hollywood navel gazing by a director who knew where all the lint was buried, blurry lines between comedy and pathos, and wonderful acting by A-list actors including Lemmon, William Holden, Robert Preston, Robert Webber and others, plus a host of lesser-knowns with small parts who enrich every scene. Rent one, rent all.
