There are a lot of unkind things you can say about S.O.B. but there are two things which are undeniable.
1. This is one of the angriest, most black hearted comedies you'll ever see.
2. Blake Edwards busts his hump to make you laugh.
Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) is a famous Hollywood producer who just created the biggest box office bomb in movie history. His film, Night Wind, has made so little money that almost everyone even remotely related to the production is in a complete panic. Except for Felix, who veers from near catatonic to suicidal. His movie star wife, Sally Miles (Julie Andrews), takes the kids and abandons Felix in his beach house and even considers divorcing him. The studio head (Robert Vaughn) is desperate to pull Night Wind out of theaters and salvage it through re-editing. He enlists Tim Culley (William Holden), an old school, old time movie director to convince Felix to give up his ironclad creative control and allow the re-editing. This doesn't sound much like a comedy, does it?
Well, after failing in several suicide attempts, Felix has an epiphany. He can turn Night Wind into the biggest hit in movie history if he changes it from wholesome family fair into a sex-charged nudie flick. Felix is willing to risk all of his, and Sally's, fortune to pull it off. But when it looks like he might actually succeed, the studio head is willing to do whatever it takes to make sure the success isn't Felix's alone. That provokes Felix to take his own desperate measures and leads to some of the darkest humor you'll ever encounter.
The best description I can come up with for S.O.B. is that it's like an R-rated Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Looked at as a single, coherent story, it's got more than a few problems. As a collection of funny bits, however, it's pretty entertaining. But while Mike Myers lovingly made fun of the 1960s spy genre, Blake Edwards was an angry, angry man ripping the cover off the inside deceit, back stabbing, ass kissing and other morally questionable realities of the movie business and he did it years before it was the hip thing to do.
Edwards throws everything but the kitchen sink at you in this movie. It has the crudest sort of toilet humor, the sharpest kind of satire, throw away one-liners, sexual decadence, slapstick pratfalls, Robert Vaughn in lingerie and Julie Andrews going topless. It doesn't fit together all that well but if you stop worrying about that, there are a lot of laughs.
You'd better be able to appreciate very dark and very bitter humor if you're going to watch S.O.B. How dark is it? There's a recurring gag about a guy dying of a heart attack on a beach and his body just lying there all day with his poor dog pining over his departed master. When you use a dog howling for his dead owner as a punchline, that's some black comedy. When the guy who's supposed to be your main characters says absolutely nothing for the first half hour of the movie and just tries to kill himself by car exhaust in his garage, hanging himself, sticking his head in an oven and trying to blow his brains out, that's some black comedy. When they steal a corpse before a funeral where Larry Storch (yes, the F Troop guy) portrays an Indian guru who gives a eulogy about how much money the deceased made, that's some black comedy.
You'll also be hard pressed to find a bigger collection of over the top performances than S.O.B. Whether it's Loretta Swit as a raging gossip columnist, Larry Hagman as a weenie studio executive, Stuart Margolin as Sally Miles' conniving personal secretary or Richard Mulligan almost exploding across the screen as Felix Farmer, subtlety is in short supply. The closest you get is Robert Preston's deadpan and hilarious zingers as the "Doctor Feelgood" to Felix' circle of friends.
And in addition to Edwards' extended rant against the sleazy underbelly of filmmaking, S.O.B also revels in his delight and confusion at the changing moral climate of mainstream film. Edwards is clearly thrilled that he can get away with naughty language, naked boobs and all other sorts of things in a big budget picture, but he also clearly isn't sure what that means to society and his industry.
S.O.B. is funny but it's very much Edwards laughing at Hollywood and himself. There's an inside joke quality to it that doesn't work much better in the 21st century, when everybody knows so much about the inside happenings of the movie business, than it did in 1981 when the public was still largely ignorant of such things.
1. This is one of the angriest, most black hearted comedies you'll ever see.
2. Blake Edwards busts his hump to make you laugh.
Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) is a famous Hollywood producer who just created the biggest box office bomb in movie history. His film, Night Wind, has made so little money that almost everyone even remotely related to the production is in a complete panic. Except for Felix, who veers from near catatonic to suicidal. His movie star wife, Sally Miles (Julie Andrews), takes the kids and abandons Felix in his beach house and even considers divorcing him. The studio head (Robert Vaughn) is desperate to pull Night Wind out of theaters and salvage it through re-editing. He enlists Tim Culley (William Holden), an old school, old time movie director to convince Felix to give up his ironclad creative control and allow the re-editing. This doesn't sound much like a comedy, does it?
Well, after failing in several suicide attempts, Felix has an epiphany. He can turn Night Wind into the biggest hit in movie history if he changes it from wholesome family fair into a sex-charged nudie flick. Felix is willing to risk all of his, and Sally's, fortune to pull it off. But when it looks like he might actually succeed, the studio head is willing to do whatever it takes to make sure the success isn't Felix's alone. That provokes Felix to take his own desperate measures and leads to some of the darkest humor you'll ever encounter.
The best description I can come up with for S.O.B. is that it's like an R-rated Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Looked at as a single, coherent story, it's got more than a few problems. As a collection of funny bits, however, it's pretty entertaining. But while Mike Myers lovingly made fun of the 1960s spy genre, Blake Edwards was an angry, angry man ripping the cover off the inside deceit, back stabbing, ass kissing and other morally questionable realities of the movie business and he did it years before it was the hip thing to do.
Edwards throws everything but the kitchen sink at you in this movie. It has the crudest sort of toilet humor, the sharpest kind of satire, throw away one-liners, sexual decadence, slapstick pratfalls, Robert Vaughn in lingerie and Julie Andrews going topless. It doesn't fit together all that well but if you stop worrying about that, there are a lot of laughs.
You'd better be able to appreciate very dark and very bitter humor if you're going to watch S.O.B. How dark is it? There's a recurring gag about a guy dying of a heart attack on a beach and his body just lying there all day with his poor dog pining over his departed master. When you use a dog howling for his dead owner as a punchline, that's some black comedy. When the guy who's supposed to be your main characters says absolutely nothing for the first half hour of the movie and just tries to kill himself by car exhaust in his garage, hanging himself, sticking his head in an oven and trying to blow his brains out, that's some black comedy. When they steal a corpse before a funeral where Larry Storch (yes, the F Troop guy) portrays an Indian guru who gives a eulogy about how much money the deceased made, that's some black comedy.
You'll also be hard pressed to find a bigger collection of over the top performances than S.O.B. Whether it's Loretta Swit as a raging gossip columnist, Larry Hagman as a weenie studio executive, Stuart Margolin as Sally Miles' conniving personal secretary or Richard Mulligan almost exploding across the screen as Felix Farmer, subtlety is in short supply. The closest you get is Robert Preston's deadpan and hilarious zingers as the "Doctor Feelgood" to Felix' circle of friends.
And in addition to Edwards' extended rant against the sleazy underbelly of filmmaking, S.O.B also revels in his delight and confusion at the changing moral climate of mainstream film. Edwards is clearly thrilled that he can get away with naughty language, naked boobs and all other sorts of things in a big budget picture, but he also clearly isn't sure what that means to society and his industry.
S.O.B. is funny but it's very much Edwards laughing at Hollywood and himself. There's an inside joke quality to it that doesn't work much better in the 21st century, when everybody knows so much about the inside happenings of the movie business, than it did in 1981 when the public was still largely ignorant of such things.