I’m lucky to possess the cutest button of a niece. She turned 4 last week. Remember 4? I don’t. In a blink after birth, we somehow make it from precious and helpless bundles of joy and wonder, drifting into Life profoundly mundane and magical. It’s all, quite holy. Soon comes mobility, laughing and sobbing within the same three minutes, expressing anger, giddiness, terror, taking first steps and surviving our first butt-tumble onto our diapers. From somewhere, perhaps a thousand lifetimes of experience, surfaces that dark, familiar conviction that, somehow, we’re getting gypped. And then, we get to meet comedy. I emailed my niece-like substance a five-minute video, which should be required viewing in elementary school. It was from the movie, “The Great Race.”
And, no.
No matter how passionately they tell you, it’s not the Irish.
The clip I sent her parents was of the famous pie fight, the greatest exchange of airborne pastry ever captured on film. Easily one of the greatest comedies of all time, I’ve seen this 1965 slapstick classic maybe 70 times. “The Great Race” used 4,000 real, actual, yummy and calorie-rich pies. The scene cost $200,000, or, about $1.5 million in today’s money.
Neat trivia? For five long days, the cast endured the goo and gore of getting pie pelted. There are harder jobs. However — a darn cream pie can weigh 2 pounds. If the scene doesn’t go quite right, the actors must get hosed off and shoot it again, sometimes several times. The crew had hidden away 400 of the high-caloric weapons. After the final, “CUT!” was yelled, everyone good-naturedly battered director Blake Edwards. He took it like a man.
Pies don’t kill people. People kill people.
The magic of Hollywood. Jack Lemmon played the identical twin roles of the evil Professor Fate and the child-like innocent, Prince Friedrich Hapnick. Lemmon (and what a name for an actor in a pie fight) was literally knocked completely unconscious twice during the epic scene. Despite winning two Oscars, Lemmon confessed he did his finest work in “The Great Race” and confided that after decades acting, his black-garbed Professor Fate character received more fan mail than for any other film. His co-star, Natalie Wood, seriously choked after getting pelted when pudding stuck in her throat. In real life, she and co-star Tony Curtis despised one another. In the film? They’re the love interest.
TGR is a long, sprawling tribute to the great silent comedies. Centered at the turn of the 20th century, it’s about a round-the-world race with a brand, new invention called the — “AUTO-mobile.” Easily, I’ve seen this movie 70 times and still laugh uncontrollably. Toward the climax, a general is explaining that the hero, The Great Leslie (Curtis), had escaped with a small friar. You know. A monk? Professor Fate (Lemmon) angrily responds: “Leslie escaped with a — chicken!?!?”
The movie sent me reflecting. I’m somewhat saddened. Since 1965, we have become so vulgar and wicked. We teach our children the same. Take a look around. We are submerged in our own bath of blood, blowing bubbles, unaware that in the warm liquid, our culture seems to be dying from 10,000 self-inflicted paper cuts.
What hit me was that I was able to send a video clip to Tina, my 4-year-old niece-like substance. No swear words in the vid. No sex scenes. No finger-wagging, “World’s Ending Again & It’s Your Fault You’ll Never Be Woke Enough” messaging. “The Great Race” is good, clean, hilarious fun, something you can show to a child.
In how many homes across America, are little kids digesting hours of pornography, some overt, most subtle, again, death by 10,000 paper cuts? We are insane. You can’t swear on broadcast TV, but, you can pretty much do anything if you call it, “cable.”
Hour after hour, vile suggestions erupt from 60-inch high-definition screens. This is what we teach our kids. This is our smarmy justification: “It’s entertainment.”
We have met the devil and he cascades from our flat screens, our home entertainment centers, laptops and cellphones.
Most of my life, I’ve worked at a job to change people’s minds. There’s no miracle syntax. No magic, all-curing bumper sticker or meme. I offer no three-hankie, life-changing sermon. Still. I often wish there was someone I could petition, someone who could actually cure my brother’s ills I falsely perceive.
I reminisce of my own non-existent good old days, of wide open spaces, right and wrong, when men were men and women were women. Babies were to be treasured, not murdered. Lines, at least in comforting theory, had a razor-sharp clarity and yes, there was hypocrisy, injustice, sin and crime. But, I can look back and fondly remember a dear, slapstick comedy about a race around the world, a movie I could take any kid to see. I’d place a small wager that after getting over the initial shock of cinema and explaining, “popcorn,” you could plop a Neanderthal in a cushioned theater seat and he’d laugh his hairy asterisk off over “The Great Race.”
Years from now, over what will this present generation fondly reminisce? Depression? Angst? Non-stop accusation? An addiction to noise and the electronic screen, the modern version of Narcissus staring at his reflection in the pool of water, right before he drowns? Will tomorrow’s mature look back fondly, remembering pornography, a relative never met who didn’t get born or a cage-match fight where some poor, modern gladiator kept getting his face smashed as an ugly audience howled in blood lust?
Cinema or movies.
Things are never as they seem.
Natalie Wood gave us one of America’s greatest comedy treasures. Right after filming “The Great Race,” she attempted suicide. There are countless dark, bitey things beneath Life’s surface, many profoundly beautiful, as well.
“Naked Came the Novelist,” John Boston’s long-awaited sequel to “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” is on sale at JohnBoston-Books.com. (It should be a movie.) Also available are other fine books, including his two-part “SCV Monsters” series. A lifelong SCV resident with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, Boston is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
