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Blake Edwards cleans house -- Hollywood is an assembly of jaded whores, cinema itself is the veteran expiring unnoticed next to a beach house bacchanalia. The aftermath of a studio catastrophe finds the shellshocked producer (Richard Mulligan) in a suicidal daze, saved from death to wander about sybaritic Malibu and get struck by a bolt of inspiration: "Sex!!" The project bombed, it’s up to old men to roll with the audience’s tastes, so his saccharine musical is tricked out into a softcore inferno ("We sold them schmaltz, they prefer sadomasochism"). His wife is the screen’s perpetual virgin (a Julie Andrews role, and, sure enough...), to be sacrificed on the altar of Tinseltown’s prurient Moloch in a purposeful degrading of the "Whistling in the Dark" 360° camera pan in Darling Lili (from Disney to Caligula is a matter of choreography). In a town of vultures and twats, honor means being honest about your meretriciousness -- the aging sensualist director (William Holden), the splenetic press agent (Robert Webber) and the soused Dr. Feelgood (Robert Preston), who understand compromise as a fact of life and art, are like musketeers next to the venal studio honchos and mag wags scampering around with the medium’s scalp in their hands. The graying movie troopers are given a dash of gallantry absent from the shrill TV stalwarts (Robert Vaughn, Loretta Swit, Larry Hagman), though, as befits Edwards’s post-Heaven’s Gate scald, Holden’s director knows his place and passes the creative torch over to Mulligan’s producer, who is snuffed for his trouble. The artist’s extinction, eulogy and Viking send-off, in an analysis that’s dapper, coarse, cynical, sad, lecherous, hopeful, and full of appreciation for the shared humanity of fellow sinners. How else to fight the Eighties, Edwards posits, but sticking with friends and making art? With Marisa Berenson, Robert Loggia, Shelley Winters, Stuart Margolin, Craig Stevens, Jennifer Edwards, and Rosanna Arquette.
--- Fernando F. Croce |