Blake Edwards (1979)
When an actor’s own life to some extent parallels a part that he’s playing on stage or screen, there’s invariably some excitement – as if the result was bound to be ‘authentic’. There’s a different kind of anticipation whenever an actor is playing an actor, even if (perhaps especially if) the character is a neurasthenic megalomaniac and the person in the role has made their name playing self-effacing, well-adjusted types. Anything the actor has done or said off-screen or offstage which might suggest a connection between him and the actor he’s pretending to be, will be taken down and used as publicity on his behalf. It’s sometimes the case, unfortunately, that these super-appropriate pieces of casting involve an actor who really is on the skids and is too desperate to produce a well thought out performance.
The year 1950 saw two famous examples of this ‘autobiographical’ casting in Hollywood, when Bette Davis played a much-honoured, bitchy, insecure-verging-on-paranoid theatre actress in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson a predatory, deluded, redundant silent film star in Sunset Boulevard. Davis, oppressed at the time by a successful past and an uncertain future, may have drawn on her own circumstances to gain insight into and empathy with Margo Channing; she nevertheless resisted the temptation to use the role to appeal nakedly to the Hollywood powers-that-were. The fact that she was playing a Broadway star and the bonus of her acting Anne Baxter, as the sneaky usurper of Margo’s throne, off the screen may have provided Davis with, respectively, distance from the part and a boost to her self-confidence. In Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder used the cast-offs Swanson and Eric von Stroheim (and Buster Keaton) in order to bite the hand that fed him as aggressively as possible but Swanson’s performance, although affecting, lacks cohesion. She invested so much of herself in Norma Desmond that she lost contact with the woman she was playing; she acted in a dynamic vacuum that went beyond Norma’s egomaniac obliviousness to her surroundings. When an actor puts his feelings into a role to an excessive degree, the result is more likely to be embarrassing self-exposure than revelation of character.
Nearly thirty years and a huge gulf in quality separate All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard from Blake Edwards’s 10. Dudley Moore plays George Webber, a nearly middle-aged, highly successful Hollywood composer, with a fondness for jazz piano. George gives women desirability ratings on a scale from 0 to 10 but is not quite as attractive to women as they are to him. He’s dissatisfied, if not unlucky, in love. As Moore is now into his forties, a successful comic actor and jazz pianist, and past his second failed marriage, there’s meant to be an added, poignant charge to casting him as George – even though his involvement in 10 is fortuitous to the extent that George Segal was first choice for the role. George Webber leaves his girlfriend, Samantha (Julie Andrews), and heads off to Mexico, where a much younger woman called Jenny (Bo Derek) is honeymooning. George glimpsed Jenny en route to her wedding and scored her 11. To cut a longish (two-hour) story short, George, after saving Jenny’s new husband’s life, succeeds in getting her to go to bed with him. When they make love, Jenny suggests they do so in rhythm with Ravel’s Bolero: her uncle once told Jenny the piece is perfectly constructed for this purpose. Some might think Bolero has too protracted a climax for this to be true but George and Jenny prove the uncle was right. At one point in 10, George burns the soles of his feet on hot Mexican sand; in due course, though, he gets cold feet. He leaves the serenely amoral Jenny and returns to Samantha (Sam). The film ends with a reprise of Bolero and a shot of George and Sam getting into the languorous Hispanic swing of things, before they disappear from our view – and from the view, through a telescope, of George’s frustrated voyeur of a neighbour in Beverly Hills.
10 is being touted as the making of Dudley Moore as both a star and a legitimate, ‘thoughtful’ actor and Moore, to judge from his remarks on a recent Parkinson show, is eager to believe his own publicity. The film is not a hit because of his dramatic talents, however. Viewers are liable to be confused when Moore convinces us – only occasionally but memorably – that George Webber is a depressed human being, as in the meandering, touching conversations that he has with a hotel barman. The audience howls with delight, though, when Dud not only wrinkles up his nose and makes gurgling noises but also intones so familiarly that only the loyal, puzzled ‘Pete?’ on the end of the line is missing. In conversation with Michael Parkinson, Dudley Moore was evidently more comfortable hiding behind his TV comedy mannerisms. I didn’t expect this in conversations that George Webber has in the film but plenty of other people evidently do expect it. For them, Moore’s (sex) appeal derives from his honest, winsome vulnerability (‘cuddly Dudley’) and it scarcely matters whether it’s Peter Cook or Bo Derek who’s making him look inadequate. Moore is right for the role in 10 – but as a sort of upmarket Norman Wisdom.
If Blake Edwards, who also wrote the screenplay, had exploited Moore’s recognised comic talents – for satirical, facial and vocal comedy – to spread over the thin plot, 10 might have worked but the slapstick bits stuck on to cover the holes in the script are desperate and mechanical. George-Dud crashes into a police car, gets stung on the nose by a bee, locks himself out of his house, whacks his own face with his revolving telescope (how much was Moore’s nose insured for on this film?), falls down a hill, spills coffee down his shirt front – and he still hasn’t arrived in Mexico, where the story really gets going. All these set-ups are presented carelessly, as if they were funny per se; with Dudley Moore performing them, there isn’t even the amusement of familiarity. (I hadn’t seen him do a drunk scene before.) His nervy, mouse-like energy raises a few laughs as George scurries up and down the red-hot beach, trying not to appear ridiculous in front of Jenny, but 10’s comic impoverishment is evident in George’s getting a swollen nose and a swollen mouth (after dentistry from Jenny’s father) within the first half-hour or so.
In spite of the (too) many Pink Panther films now behind him, Blake Edwards remains a slipshod and unimaginative director of physical comedy. When George struggles, pocket Sisyphus-like, up a steep bank to reach a telephone, we know it will stop ringing just before he gets to it: the sequence relies entirely on how inventively he keeps failing to climb up in time, and it doesn’t pass muster. The words of the marriage service, an idiotic, celebrity-hungry priest and a farting, grotesquely geriatric housekeeper are all dragged in as if they, like Dudley Moore’s set pieces, are hilarious regardless of presentation and context. The last of these jokes seems gratuitously cruel although when Edwards’s camera lingers on the bovine, worried faces of two bull-necked red-necks bathing in the sea in Mexico, it seems to be more in sorrow than in anger. Only a few of the cameos in 10 – Sam’s teenage son (Rad Daly), an ingratiating Mexican beach boy[1] – are more convincing.
Many people prefer Edwards’s earlier films, humorous but heavy, like Days of Wine and Roses; he certainly still seems like a director in search of a style. The telescopes that George and his neighbour use to spy on each other’s sex life are a potentially powerful image of, and comment on, the miserable, over-exposed celebrity culture of Beverly Hills but Edwards persists in using the peeping Tom material jokily. He’s also unclear about crucial elements. George fantasises about Jenny, then sails heroically out to sea and saves the life of her new husband (who’s fallen asleep on a surfboard); with these two sequences juxtaposed, truth seems strikingly stranger than fiction. But what does George think of what he’s done? Does he, when the altruistic crunch comes, ditch his fantasy of possessing Jenny? Or is his fantasy so strong that the life-saving makes no impression on him? This isn’t clarified in the way it needs to be; only when the husband (Sam J Jones) speaks to Jenny and George from hospital, while they’re enjoying themselves to Ravel, does George reveal any sense of moral dislocation about what’s happening.
Although George’s relationship with Sam isn’t much developed beyond a big argument between them, this at least ends with George’s best line, addressed to the relatively Amazonian Julie Andrews: ‘I wouldn’t mind losing like a man if you didn’t insist on winning like one’. The relationship between him and Hugh (Robert Webber), the gay but bleak writer of lyrics to George’s music, is even more perfunctory, although Dudley Moore underplays well, in contrast to Robert Webber’s over-deliberate, buttonholing performance. Edwards pursues his ‘male menopause’ theme by concentrating on George’s fantasies. There could be dramatic interest and pathos in the story of a man who projects his regrets for youth and innocence onto an object of sexual desire because of his fear of middle age and beyond (even though this fear is the stated diagnosis of George’s analyst rather than something fully illustrated through action and character). But George’s idealisation of Jenny requires an impossible suspension of disbelief: if he thinks Bo Derek is virginity incarnate, George can’t have watched many films like 10, even though he’s supposed to compose music for them. If George worshipped Jenny with an intensity that increased as her alarming insouciance became ever clearer, it would supply some much-needed tension but his realisation of what she really is arrives too quickly. Dudley Moore, left stranded by the script, mugs with a series of gulps and dazed double-takes, as Jenny’s body and mind are revealed. (The sun-kissed Bo Derek’s best moment – apart from the opening shot of her in the wedding car – is when Jenny offers George marijuana in her best hostess voice.)
The homosexual lyricist looks like a football coach. George’s black analyst is built like an ex-boxing champion, heavyweight division[2]. Sam is a popular musical actress who is sexually emancipated and bordering on intellectual. This is Blake Edwards’s idea of making characters ‘unusual’. The lyricist and the analyst are distinctive simply by looking and sounding nothing like the person you might expect them to be – and which the script, in terms of the lines they deliver, defines them as. The part of Sam is a more complex matter. Edwards is clearly aware of the qualities that his wife, Julie Andrews, projects on screen. You hear people say, ‘It’s such a pity Julie Andrews got saddled with the Mary Poppins–Sound of Music image – there’s so much more to her than that’. It’s true that Andrews was unlucky to become Hollywood’s most wholesome star just as censorship was being relaxed in the mid-sixties. Pretty soon, the goody-goody characters she played were ludicrous compared with those populating most other contemporary films, let alone real life. Andrews’s attempts to escape the Maria von Poppins persona led her to, in ascending order of urgency, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Star! and Torn Curtain. (These were all critical failures and commercially disappointing although none was a complete flop in box-office terms.) Andrews was particularly miscast as Gertrude Lawrence in Star! Lawrence’s magnetism transcended her technical shortcomings as a singer and an actress; conversely, Julie Andrews is much less than the sum of her theatrical parts. Her voice, even more than her face, lacks edge and malice: her elocution class cadences destroyed her portrait of Lawrence as a charismatic bitch. When Andrews tried for the ribaldry of music-hall in Star!, she sounded hearty and condescending.
Apart from the forgettable (and forgotten) The Tamarind Seed, Andrews has spent just about a decade in cinema cold storage. The striking tensions evident in her playing of Sam may derive from her own resentment of living, professionally if not privately, with her stage and screen personality. Ironically, she may be bringing more of herself to this role than Dudley Moore brings to his. Andrews is used cynically in this film and she seems, if not complicit with this, resigned to it. Her lack of sensuality was a joke with smart-aleck audiences in the sixties and she’s now pickled in virginity – pace several years of Woman’s Own interviews which tell-a-different-story and the fact that in 10 the woman she’s playing doesn’t wear a bra. Julie Andrews’s height makes her more comical than Dudley Moore’s lack of height makes him; she swears with her trademark precise alacrity and uses Americanisms (‘Huh?’, ‘in the sack’, etc) with toe-curling, chirpy awkwardness. Blake Edwards is properly concerned for his wife’s modesty – the editor (Ralph E Winters) is very discreet when Sam gets into or out of bed or a shower – yet Edwards perpetuates Julie Andrews’s screen image at the same time as he tries to send it up. He has given her the chance to demonstrate range and depth by playing a role that acknowledges and embodies her romantic inexpressiveness and her governessy, fair play qualities. These are qualities that Sam is bristlingly aware of but which, as far as Andrews is concerned, Mary Poppins manifested more entertainingly. She is naturally resistant to the probing camera; it’s the one spontaneous constant in her screen performances. When Alan Jay Lerner remarked that it was a pity she left the stage (where she wasn’t subject to the same close-up scrutiny and, I would guess, was more powerful as a fine technician), he was much righter than those who regret that Andrews made the two pictures in which she was most effective. In spite of the respectful cutting and the ‘revealing’ casting and packing of Dudley Moore, no one is so unfortunately exposed in 10 as Julie Andrews.
[1980s]
[1] Afternote: I can’t identify this character from the IMDB cast list.
[2] Afternote: As previous footnote …
