I'm not at home in a culture in which a young couple can say that "our song" is Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

10
Blake Edwards 1979 USA
Starring: Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, Bo Derek, Robert Webber, Dee Wallace, Brian Dennehy, Sam J Jones, Max Showalter


Watching Dudley Moore play dinner-party jazz on the piano before breaking into boogie-woogie is one of life's small joys. Although, seeing that paragon of cinematic goodness Julie Andrews calling someone a "shitheel" and threatening to punch them in the mouth is probably up there as well. Moore's movie career (Arthur aside) not so much. Still, this is one of his better, more complex roles with his George misanthropic, borderline alcoholic and perpetually in-crisis yet ultimately lovable, despite an unpleasant vein of chauvinism and homophobia that thankfully dissipates early on. He'd be unsympathetic if he wasn't so unlucky. At one point, while spying on his sexually histrionic neighbour, he curses the man's good fortune, swipes his telescope, is clocked on the temple by it as it spins, stumbles backwards, falling over a wall in the process, and rolls down a hill. That he gets a much-awaited phone call at the same moment and has to try and scramble up the hill in vain to answer it seems slightly cruel. But it works. We can even sort of see why, despite having a successful career, he's constantly so irritated. When, practically on a whim, he decides to run off to Mexico in pursuit of a woman he's glimpsed at a set of traffic lights and inexplicably fallen in love with (even he can't understand why she's so special) we're somehow with him. Moore's brilliant while there too, exchanging barbs with a fast-talking barman (a wonderfully glib Brian Dennehy) and finding an almost childlike humanity in his character even while slugging industrial amounts of brandy. But of course when he finds his Ravel-loving dream woman (a pretty poor but paradoxically at her best Bo Derek) and manages to bumble his way into her bed she's not at all as he imagined. It sounds like a fairly lightweight premise and, to be honest, it is but it's also charming, frequently hilarious and surprisingly vicious with much of the credit having to go to Moore. I don't think I need to say that if it were to be remade it just wouldn't work. When Arthur was remade in 2011 I was moved to write Russell Brand a strongly-worded letter involving the phrase "even God would want to shit on your face after watching your performance you meat-headed dicksplash" so I dread to think what my response would be if it was. It probably wouldn't be as extreme but I certainly wouldn't be happy.