For such a prolific and successful director, Blake Edwards has yet to be reevaluated and rediscovered by film fans born after 1990. Unlike Billy Wilder, another comic master who started directing in the 1940s and continued through the upheavals of the late-1960s and 1970s, Edwards never retired: his last film was 1993’s Son of the Pink Panther, which was followed by a Broadway version of his Victor/Victoria that ran for four years, and then a number of productions of Big Rosemary beginning in 1999 and ending shortly before his death in 2010 at the age of 88. Wilder bombed out with 1982’s Buddy Buddy, and he spent the remaining 20 years of his life moderately content, alternately showing of his astounding art collection and begging Steven Spielberg to let him direct Schindler’s List.
Wilder was America’s foremost comic director after Charlie Chaplin exiled himself to Europe, and he was recognized by the Academy like no other comedian before or since: 21 nominations and six wins, along with a blowjob honorary award toward the end of his life. Chaplin famously accepted an honorary Oscar in 1972 accompanied by the longest standing ovation in the ceremony’s history, and was awarded another all-but-honorary Oscar the following year for composing the score to his 1952 Limelight, which only became eligible 20 years after its release.
More than horror, comedy is rarely taken seriously or even acknowledged by the press or the dozens of awards shows that precede the Oscars. Comic actors making impressive about faces in dramas and thrillers—think Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls, Steve Carrell in Foxcatcher—are always snubbed, if they’re even nominated. It’s not necessary to watch the Oscars, but if you want to know where Hollywood’s head is at, there’s no better barometer. Even after the #OscarsSoWhite voter shakeup 10 years ago, the kinds of films that are nominated and win haven’t changed much, even if the winner demographics are more politically correct.
If Bruce Willis were still working, would he have a chance at the Oscars? Please. He didn’t even get nominated for Pulp Fiction. Despite its generational shuffle, the Academy is still sniffy and obsessed with decorum—I mean, how would it look if they gave Adam Sandler an Oscar? Ditto Blake Edwards, Wilder’s only real comic competition of his peerage. Edwards had a really strange career: a beloved classic (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), an iconic franchise that produced nine films, acclaimed dramas like Days of Wine and Roses, and over a dozen “spy-thriller-romance-comedy-musical” hybrids like The Tamarind Seed, The Great Race, The Party, and The Carey Treatment. This all before 1979, when, at the age of 57, he had one of the biggest hits of his career: 10, the brilliant male midlife crisis sex comedy starring Dudley Moore and introducing Bo Derek.
10 is remembered most for Derek, her cornrows, and maybe the use of Ravel’s “Bolero,” but no one ever talks about Moore. If you bring up Moore and 10, most people will think you’re talking about Arthur, which is a great movie but not the masterpiece of male ennui and misadventure that’s 10. That film was such a success that Edwards spent the rest of the 1980s busier than ever, directing 13 films, almost all of them obvious riffs on 10, none as good as the original. No qualms—he comes close enough with Micki & Maude (“Is she a lawyer or a cellist?”), the Burt Reynolds-led François Truffaut remake The Man Who Loved Women, and 1987’s Blind Date, starring Bruce Willis in his first credited feature.
The set-up is pure Old Hollywood: Willis is on a blind date, and although he’s adamantly opposed, he’s pressured into it. Turns out Kim Basinger isn’t a hideous wretch, and at first they hit it off—and then she drinks. Mind you, friend Phil Hartman warned “Don’t put any liquor in her… she gets… crazy…” Good crazy? Crazy in bed? Willis thinks so, and as she protests a toast, insisting she gets “really crazy” when she drinks, Willis smiles as he practically forces the flute to her lips. He’s a basically decent guy in way over his head, and by the time he realizes his mistake, it’s too late: Basinger is making scenes, playing with people’s food, and embarrassing Willis’ boss, who emphasized that his employees should “watch their wives” around a rich, conservative Japanese investor. Basinger doesn’t get drunk so much as possessed: she ends up snatching the investor’s wife’s Geisha wig off, sending her screaming into the bathroom, and informing her that in California, she’s entitled to 50 percent of her husband’s earnings. All of a sudden she speaks English: “…fifty percent?”
Your mileage may vary with this kind of broad slapstick and deliriously lascivious and irreverent view of men and women, but what’s undeniable is Willis’ abilities as a comic performer. This had already been established on television with Moonlighting, and if Die Hard wasn’t such a big hit just one year after Blind Date, it’s easy to see Willis appearing in more comedies like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But after Pulp Fiction brought him out of a brief rut, he played it safe for the rest of his career, turning in only a few more comedies (The Whole Nine Yards, Death Becomes Her, Look Who’s Talking) along with endless action movies and thrillers.
Willis is only 71, but aphasia and dementia robbed him of his golden years. Before his diagnosis was known, he was widely mocked for appearing in countless straight-to-DVD action schlockfests, all no doubt inspired by Die Hard, the film that left him deaf in one ear and cut and bruised all over. He’ll only be properly recognized in death, when his disease can’t make people uncomfortable, when history can be rewritten and he’ll “have always been known as” the heir to Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster, John Garfield, you name it. But even in assisted living, Willis has yet to be recognized as an extraordinary leading man, an underrated comedian, and an example of the kind of movie star that Hollywood doesn’t produce anymore: straight, white, male, conservative, bald.
But you know this. I doubt you know Blind Date unless you were around in the late-1980s. Among Edwards’ post-10 variations on a theme, it ranks among the best. And it’s certainly funnier than Buddy, Buddy.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM