Friday, June 14, 2002 | 8:46 a.m.
Blake Edwards made "The Great Race" in 1965, after the first two "Pink Panther" movies. The movie was loosely based on an actual road race that took place in 1908, but it owed more to Laurel and Hardy, to whom the film was affectionately dedicated. From the first frame and the first few notes of Henry Mancini's lighthearted score, one could safely expect slapstick.
As it turned out, however, Laurel and Hardy were only related to "The Great Race" in name. Edwards reunited the "Some Like it Hot" pairing of Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. He cast Natalie Wood, fresh from "Sex and the Single Girl." And he allowed Lemmon to do something that "Some Like it Hot" director Billy Wilder never did -- play the part of Professor Fate as loudly and as broadly as he liked.
The results more or less transcend the film. "The Great Race," available on DVD (Warner Home Video, $19.98), isn't the strongest of Edwards' comedies, and as farces go it's a poor cousin to "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," released two years earlier. But Lemmon's performance -- as Fate and as the drunken Prince Hapnik -- flips the entire show on its back. In tandem with Peter Falk (as Fate's servant Max), he pushes the movie into the sublime every time he's onscreen -- which is, thankfully, often.
That's not to say his co-stars are lacking. Curtis does a charming turn as the heroic Great Leslie, and Wood is fetching and funny as reporter and suffragette Maggie DuBois. But as they play through their roles, Lemmon blasts through his; he speeds the movie through its dead time, including, but not limited to, a couple of Mancini's lesser songs and the largest pie fight ever filmed. Lemmon has no time for this nonsense -- he's on a roll.
Competing in a New York-to-Paris auto race against Leslie, Professor Fink is as unsportsmanlike as they come: He blasts Leslie with a cannon, gets him arrested for spying and repeatedly saddles him with Maggie, who beguiles Leslie and slows him down. He's not above beating up his own charge, either -- Max is kicked, smacked, dunked and generally treated similar to an eternally apologizing beanbag.
"Rise and shine, Professor!" Max says cheerfully. "You rise, you shine!" Fate snarls. Told that Leslie has escaped capture with "a small friar," Fate bellows, "Leslie escaped with a chicken?" Every minute or so Lemmon builds from a growl to an explosion to diabolic laughter. If you've ever wondered what it looks like inside an atom, Lemmon must surely come close.
The DVD is thin on extras, but includes a "making-of" special that was released with the film, and the tantalizing look it affords at the pictures' stars in down time -- Curtis doing push-ups and shooting pool, Falk playing golf on the set, Wood graciously suffering the papparazzi -- makes "The Great Race" worth at least a rental. For those who love to watch explosions, however, it's a must have. Lemmon sets off dozens in "The Great Race," and you'll love leaning into the shockwave.com.
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