S.O.B. (1981) Whenever Hollywood filmmakers turned the cameras on their own industry, the results could fall all over the map......
They could end up with a bouncy musical confection like "Singin' In The Rain", or dive deep into depressing psychosis and moral rot ("The Bad And The Beautiful", "Sunset Boulevard", "The Day Of The Locust", "The Legend Of Lylah Clare")
The motives behind making these movies were fairly simple - generate some hefty box office coin by giving us mere mortals a forbidden sneak peak at what goes in inside the dream factory.
But we know of only one movie that functioned as a mammoth poison arrow aimed right at the rapacious, cold, barely beating heart of the Hollywood studio system, Blake Edwards' take-no-prisoners satire, "S.O.B.", (its acronym for 'Standard Operating Bullshit')
Writer-director Edwards and his then wife, that global sweetheart Julie Andrews has just survived an in-and-out trip through the studio meat grinder, which chewed on them with almost gleeful abandon.
Their epic, hugely ambitious, World War I musical-drama "Darling Lili" became one of the most legendarily costly flops of 1970. And shortly thereafter, Edwards endured the further hell of making two films, "The Wild Rovers" and "The Carey Treatment" under the ruinous, meddling reign of 'smiling cobra' James Aubrey.
As they often do in Hollywood, fortunes reverse upwards, and Edwards climbed on top of the heap again with his revival of the "Pink Panther" series with Peter Sellers and the Dudley Moore, Bo Derek comedy "10".
And what better time to fully unleash his decades of rage, resentment and utter contempt for the film industry and all of its bizarre, self-centered greedy denizens whose egos bring them to the very brink of total madness......(and bring us the audience terrible films)
Even though we could sense Edwards' overwhelming derision for his chosen profession in "S.O.B.", he was, first and foremost, a most skilled pop culture entertainer with a Chaplin-esque gift for staging physical comedy.
Whatever you may think of all the despicable characters on display here, this movie is funny, funny, funny. The damn thing's two hours long and we laughed ourselves silly all the way through it.
The film opens with Julie Andrews in full sweetheart mode, singing and dancing "Polly Wolly Doodle" in a musical number that looks like a deleted scene from.....well, a typical Julie Andrews musical.
And it is, of course, a scene from the film's fictitious, over-budgeted flop musical produced and written by Andrews' husband (Richard Mulligan, doing a frenzied version of Black Edwards)
The film's failure is the talk of Tinseltown, which leads the traumatized Mulligan to perform hilarious, elaborate suicide attempts straight out of a Pink Panther film.
Even worse than his failed movie and equally failed marriage to Andrews, Mulligan's spectacular Malibu beach house serves as a magnet for a wild menagerie of Hollywood players, wanna-bes and assorted hangers on.
These include a film director (William Holden), a Dr. Feelgood drug dispenser who's not above jamming a needle into his own ass (Robert Preston, stealing every scene he's in), a nervous P.R. guy (Larry Hagman), a rabid gossip columnist (Loretta Swit) and an agent (Shelly Winters) who knows where all the bodies are buried.
In a desperate effort to keep the slick sharkish studio boss (Robert Vaughan) from disemboweling his film, Mulligan embarks on an insane effort to re-edit and re-shoot the bubbly family musical as a porn film......complete with Andrews baring her breasts. (Which, in fact, Andrews does, for the first time ever
Not only is 'S.O.B.' peppered with Blake Edwards' trademark intricate slapstick sequences, the viciously funny dialogue cuts a brutal swath through Hollywood people, their preening self-satisfaction and haywire moral compasses. Let's just say that the director has a glorious, wonderful time, biting the hand that's both fed him and spit him out. And his cast, especially Preston, proves more than up to the task of lampooning the real people their characters are based on.
In the long, uneven history of Hollywood films on Hollywood, you won't find a nastier, crazier, more laugh-laden movie than than one. By all means, seek it out. 4 stars (****).
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