I'm giving this film extra points because I have such fond memories of it; but the reader should be aware that this is over-rating it as a film.
The bad news: it is way overlong; Edwards always was a terribly self-indulgent parodist, even on the Peter Gunn show; the big pie fight is excruciatingly mishandled; Curtis and Lemmon were told to ham it up and they do, and this gets painful sometimes; the story is silly and the finale unsatisfying.
The good news: Natalie Wood is beautiful and unforgettable and does marvelous. The camera work makes the sound-stage "exteriors" come alive, without ever hiding the fact that they are in a sound-stage (they're intended to look phony). The story does have an oddly epic feel to it which is why it remains watchable despite its length and occasionally unfunny sequences.
The film is of course really of the 1960s genre "camp". Nobody's ever adequately explained the appearance of this genre; the silent films Blake is spoofing here were brilliantly spoofed in their own day by much brighter comic minds like Keaton and Chaplin, so it's not clear why anybody in the '60s thought they needed to be spoofed again. After all, "The Perils of Pauline" is from the same era that gave us Von Stroheim's brutally realistic "Greed"; did movie-makers of the '60s really think they were so much more "mature" and "sophisticated" than Eric Von Stroheim? If not, then why pretend that the silent film era was somehow an age of "innocence" that we had "gone beyond"? '60s camp is, in the last analysis, a collective monument to generational arrogance, nothing more; but I suppose, since this arrogance is a recurring problem in Modern culture, we need reminders that one generation's arrogance is another's fodder for parody.
The bad news: it is way overlong; Edwards always was a terribly self-indulgent parodist, even on the Peter Gunn show; the big pie fight is excruciatingly mishandled; Curtis and Lemmon were told to ham it up and they do, and this gets painful sometimes; the story is silly and the finale unsatisfying.
The good news: Natalie Wood is beautiful and unforgettable and does marvelous. The camera work makes the sound-stage "exteriors" come alive, without ever hiding the fact that they are in a sound-stage (they're intended to look phony). The story does have an oddly epic feel to it which is why it remains watchable despite its length and occasionally unfunny sequences.
The film is of course really of the 1960s genre "camp". Nobody's ever adequately explained the appearance of this genre; the silent films Blake is spoofing here were brilliantly spoofed in their own day by much brighter comic minds like Keaton and Chaplin, so it's not clear why anybody in the '60s thought they needed to be spoofed again. After all, "The Perils of Pauline" is from the same era that gave us Von Stroheim's brutally realistic "Greed"; did movie-makers of the '60s really think they were so much more "mature" and "sophisticated" than Eric Von Stroheim? If not, then why pretend that the silent film era was somehow an age of "innocence" that we had "gone beyond"? '60s camp is, in the last analysis, a collective monument to generational arrogance, nothing more; but I suppose, since this arrogance is a recurring problem in Modern culture, we need reminders that one generation's arrogance is another's fodder for parody.