The Great Race

An automobile race from New York to Paris at the turn of the century. On one side the Great Leslie, spotless in white from beginning to end; on the other Professor Fate, who sets every trap and falls into each of them himself. Blake Edwards directed. Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood star. The starting point was a real event, the 1908 New York to Paris race, which Edwards used very loosely. It was the most expensive comedy made to that date, with the budget rising to 12 million dollars. Its most famous section is the pie fight. Four thousand pies were thrown across five days; the sequence cost 200,000 dollars, 18,000 of it on pastry alone. Edwards deliberately kept his hero clean and explained why: the audience will start yearning for him to get it. The white pie arrives at exactly that moment. Reviews on release were mostly negative and the film struggled financially, though it took over 11.4 million dollars in rentals. It won the Academy Award for Best Sound Effects with four further nominations. The cartoon characters and the racing premise later influenced the animated series Wacky Races. Who it is for: viewers who like old-fashioned slapstick and comedy at scale. Who it is not for: anyone short on patience for length. It runs past 160 minutes and stretches a single joke a very long way.