Simply Perfect

Must See Movie...

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Absolutely brilliant

Edwards and his wife Julie Andrews wanted to make a kiss-off to Hollywood. This is not a bad inspiration for a film. But the result is a muddle.Edwards can be an uneven director; sometimes he's hilarious, sometimes he's not funny at all (and his Asian caricatures from Breakfast at Tiffany's to this film make me wonder if Edwards understands that playing racial stereotypes without irony is not funny).In this film, his best and worst are often in the same scene. It's hard to understand what Edwards is condemning because he doesn't put forth a realistic central character or premise (even in 1981, re-shooting a failed film as bad as the one he presents here by putting in sex sex sex wouldn't bring you instant box office). William Holden and Robert Preston are excellent in the film as old time cynics with a heart. But they're not the central focus of the film -- that would be Mulligan, a funny actor but not one to present the conflicted portrait of a gifted director gone bad. Edwards never takes Mulligan's Felix Farmer's plight seriously -- which undercuts the comedy. Why was his film so bad in the beginning? If he had shown the execs causing the problems, then that would have made Mulligan's actions more plausible -- if not in the realm of realism. Another narrative mistake with Felix, Edwards tells us this was Felix's first failure. Would a multimillionaire successful Hollywood guy with a giant ego go suicidal insane over one failure?That's the problem. Felix's downfall isn't understandable -- and he appears so inept his previous success isn't understandable; and the loyalty he inspires in Holden and Preston's characters isn't understandable, because we don't see why they'd have affection for Felix as a person or a filmmaker. If we're supposed to feel bad because Felix loses his movie, we don't, because we don't know how a man with so little talent got a 30 million dollar (1981 dollars) budget in the first place. If Edwards had drawn a realistic Felix character, and cut down on some of the slapstick elements, he might have had a good, if clichéd, Hollywood cautionary tale. Instead, he made a hollow film about a hollow business. In the end, this makes Edwards as bad as the ones he's trying to eviscerate.

Seeing this movie as a 21 year old was not a good idea. I was literate and mature enough to understand that this was an adult satire, but I was too much of a little boy to understand the grownup-ness of the characters. Ultimately, my 48 year old mind understands that I missed something in SOB, but I can't get by the quarter century old memory of thinking that this Blake Edwards comedy was a dud.I do remember laughing. And Rosanna Arquette's stripping in front of William Holden ("If that's nothing, I can't even conceive of what 'something' might be!"). There was lots of sharp dialogue and slapstick. Julie Andrews looked, well, perky, but by the time she did her newsworthy strip, what little attention span I was paying to the movie had spooled out. Yet that's all I remember. A lot of insider jokes and bared breasts. This isn't so much a review as a confession that I didn't get the movie. I remember feeling faintly disgusted with Mary Poppins popping out, in a repulsive, leathery musical number. I had a narrow window of opportunity to get SOB, but I missed it.I'm not really interested in giving it another shot.

"S.O.B" had great promise when it came out in the summer of 1981. Director Blake Edwards, who was on a winning streak, used his greatest professional disaster, a bomb he made with wife Julie Andrews 11 years before called "Darling Lili," as the basis for an all-star satire on shallow loyalties and bottom-line mentalities in Hollywood. The newspaper ad featured a cartoon bull in a director's chair, smoking a cigar with the legend "The bull hits the fan July 1." Oh, yes, and Andrews was making her topless debut, too. It seemed all too cool to be true, and was. "S.O.B." never caught fire, and watching it 25 years later is to understand why. It's a comedy that forgets to be funny.Richard Mulligan plays moviemaker Felix Farmer, whose latest picture "Night Wind" is in serious trouble after previews. ("N.Y. Critics Break 'Wind'" is the headline in Variety.) At first falling into a suicidal funk, he then gets the idea to reshoot the film as an erotic spectacular, deciding that sex sells and giving the public what it wants means getting his wife, Sally Miles (Andrews), to show them her breasts. As excitement builds for this second "Wind", hard-charging studio boss David Blackman (Robert Vaughn) decides to use whatever foul means he can to steal Farmer's film out from under him."S.O.B." boasts an all-star cast of TV actors like Mulligan and Vaughn whom Edwards and the script throw out on the screen with lame one-liners they scream at the top of their lungs. Loretta Swit as a gossip columnist is the worst offender. William Holden in his last film wears ugly sunglasses and seems a frail shadow of the actor he was only a few years before in "Network," leaving most of the foreground to Robert Preston, who adds a touch of class and gives "S.O.B" its few decent lines as a drug- and wisdom-dispensing doctor."If he doesn't remember me, mention his first case of the clap," he says of Blackman. "I didn't give it to him, I cured it!""S.O.B." doesn't work as a comedy because it doesn't really try to be a comedy. Instead, Edwards rubs old sores over "Lili" and tries to get even with the people who clipped his wings long ago. Maybe it worked for him. If someone told him back then that he couldn't make a worse film than "Lili," then he proved them wrong here."S.O.B." has a lot of repetitious gags, like a hole in a floor people keep falling through. A flaccid score by Henry Mancini kills any lingering affection you may have had for that old number "Polly-Wolly-Doodle." Mulligan's overacting is embarrassingly bad and shticky, and the narrative is advanced in the form of unrealistic television reports, including a live bulletin when Sally Miles is getting ready for her nude scene.Andrews' breasts are the fifth- and sixth-best reasons to see "S.O.B" (Rosanna Arquette and Marisa Berenson appear topless here as well). But there's not much else to perk your interest, unless you enjoy seeing a good director sacrifice his art for the sake of purging his bitterness. "S.O.B." is as sad as the faithful dog we see on the beach, mourning his dead, forgotten owner and serving as a thematic device for the heartlessness of the other characters. It's appropriate in one way: "S.O.B." is a D.O.G.

I first saw S.O.B. in its original theatrical release in 1981, when I was 15 (yes, we snuck in). Not having cultivated a taste for dark comedy yet, I thought the film was in extremely bad taste, including the "defloration" of Julie Andrews.Well, 24 years later (was it REALLY that long ago?), I picked up a used and badly battered copy of the videotape at a junk sale and watched it again. How could I have completely missed such subtlety? It's "Sunset Boulevard" on laughing gas, complete with William Holden in his last screen appearance.The setting is then-contemporary Hollywood and its environs, which in and of itself adds a few unintended laughs. After a big-budget family film flops, and its director's suicide attempt and nervous breakdown are treated with barbiturates, the director seizes upon the brilliant idea to re-cut the film to suit the adult tastes of the average viewing audience.As in "Boulevard", "The Player" and myriad other movies about the inner workings of the film industry, a tapestry of cross-allegiances begins its delicate ballet, first to blackball the errant director, then to woo his wholesome actress-singer wife into a nude scene, and finally, when the re-cut film is a smash, to steal the film from the director via his estranged and newly emboldened wife.The jokes still work, and since Hollywood's only changes since shooting wrapped seem to be cosmetic, the wry commentary on the selfishness and fickleness of the film industry and its larger players still holds true.