Culture

What to Stream: Blake Edwards’s Masterwork Documentary of His Wife, Julie Andrews


The documentary “Julie,” starring Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, is the director’s secret masterwork.Photograph from Paramount Pictures / Shutterstock

I’ve been reading and greatly enjoying a new edition of interviews with Blake Edwards, edited by Gabriella Oldham (University Press of Mississippi), which has sent me to watch and revisit a few of his films—an experience that has helped me to parse my mix of enthusiasm for and aversion to his work. Edwards (who died in 2010) was a comedic genius, the most skilled and inspired director of physical comedy working in Hollywood in his time—yet much of the best of that comedy, as in the “Pink Panther” films, is interspersed among interminable narrative scenes of forced gaiety. Other movies have even less of the ingenuity, and more of the franticness. Yet Edwards has also made some of the best movies of modern times, including “Experiment in Terror,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Wild Rovers,” and even “Sunset,” which has been much, and wrongly, maligned, including by Edwards himself. (All four are available to stream.)

The four films I’ve mentioned are all melodramas with varying degrees of comedy with which they watch and wink at themselves, even as they deliver authentic and spontaneous emotion. They’re mashups, idiosyncratic and energetic fusions of Hollywood genres, tones, and styles, which yield imaginative wonders and awesome passions at their exposed fault lines. For that matter, the mashing up is itself the source of directorial invention; the mashup is the very core of Edwards’s sensibility. It hit me: Edwards had the misfortune of being a latecomer, who depended greatly—both practically and psychologically—on the studio mechanisms that also frustrated and inhibited him. His sense of genre came from an earlier age of Hollywood, and his best work reflects his distinctive background, his personal intimacy with the deep roots of the studio era—its enduring traditions and the spontaneous modernism at their source.

An inside-Hollywood child (born in 1922, he was the step-grandson of a movie director and the stepson of a production manager), Edwards came up at the tail end of the classic studio system. He entered cinematic history with a movie I consider among the most overrated of all time, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” a work of leaden whimsy made worse by the mocking racism of Mickey Rooney’s yellowface role. Edwards borrowed one other trait from early Hollywood: the primordial sense of a director who also wrote many of his own scripts. Edwards was a screenwriter (and, for that matter, a radio and TV writer) before he directed movies, and throughout his career he wrote or co-wrote most of his own films; that writing is often at war with his extravagant directorial inventiveness. Unlike such writer-directors as Joseph Mankiewicz, Edwards offers less of a sense of setting a text and more of a sense of delivering it. He is, at his best and at his worst, an embodiment of the classic auteur ideal.

His 1970 hybrid of a war film, a spy drama, a musical, and a romantic comedy, “Darling Lili”—which wraps a few exquisite moments of swoony romanticism in jack-in-the-box antics and a gross excess of churning action and sluggish plotting—was a financial disaster that he attributed largely to studio interference that shifted the film’s emphases and, above all, busted the budget. He followed it with “Wild Rovers,” a new-breed mashup of a Western and comedy with bleak existential absurdism and volatile John Cassavetes-like drama, and the studio mutilated it prior to its release. (The restored version available now is much closer to Edwards’s original cut.) He then channelled his bitterness into an inside-Hollywood satire, “S.O.B.,” that’s much tamer than it seems. (“Sunset,” from 1988, but set in 1929, in Hollywood, is a far richer film about studio life and its links to life at large.) Perhaps the strangest case in his career is that of the sharply personal and extravagantly imaginative “10,” from 1979, which is perhaps his greatest and most calamitous display of belatedness. It’s a mashup of the male coming-of-middle-age story, the erotic rhapsody, and slapstick—it is, in effect, “The Heartbreak Man,” a midlife version of Elaine May’s 1972 comedy “The Heartbreak Kid,” and, by the time Edwards made it, at decade’s end, it should have been a period piece, set around 1970 and contextualized to deliver the full shock and the historic power of the new sixties freedoms of which the protagonist struggles to partake.

On the other hand, there’s a secret masterwork by Edwards that’s hiding in plain sight, and one that’s vitally of its moment, a documentary that he filmed in 1972 called “Julie.” (The version that’s streaming, on YouTube, is lo-fi; it doesn’t matter.) “Julie,” too, is a sort of genre mashup—combining the portrait film and the personal documentary with the exotic category of documentaries by filmmakers who mainly made dramas. (Anthology Film Archives’s 2018 program “Documentarists for a Day” offered a remarkable batch of such one-off documentaries.) Julie Andrews was offered the chance to host her own network-TV prime-time variety show; Edwards, who’d been married to Andrews since 1969, was in a state of crisis under the pressure of studio power and was taking time off. He used that time to make a film that started with the very question of whether Andrews should accept the offer, and what the effect of her television schedule would be on her family life and her professional life.

Much of the movie involves scenes of Andrews and Edwards speaking together and separately about their relationship and their creative work and scenes of the couple together with their three children—a personal documentary of home life, at the breakfast table, the tennis court, the swimming pool, the beach, albeit with a pair of performers (Edwards started as an actor) for whom being on camera is automatically a self-conscious act of creation. The initial scenes of Andrews in a dressing room and on a set make clear that she accepted the offer—a five-year contract—and Edwards, though wary of the effect the show would have on her career, was completely encouraging at a personal level, and he films her work on it with enthusiasm, ardor, admiration, and love. (In 1986, Edwards directed “That’s Life!,” a movie starring Andrews and Jack Lemmon which he shot in his home and centered on his family life; “Julie” is the far greater work.)

The documentary starts with a closeup of Andrews that’s both intimate and glamorous, personal and radiantly cinematic. A seemingly infinite variety of such closeups of her recur throughout the film and sustain that abidingly dramatic tone, at once authentic and virtually fictional. Edwards also films with rapt fascination the rehearsal-studio process, of singing and dancing and strategizing and character-crafting. (He also creates an antic sped-up sequence that blends this process with the rituals of home life.) On the set of the broadcast, in rehearsal or during the actual recording of the broadcast, Edwards crafts lavishly textured and discerning sequences of Andrews and the crew at work, and the only problem with these grand and intricate scenes is their brevity—the whole documentary runs a mere fifty-two minutes, and these engrossing performance and pre-performance sequences could have run much longer. For all its offhanded and casual charm, “Julie” is one of Edwards’s major achievements.



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