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There Couldn't BE a More Fitting Final Film for William Holden

posted 2 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Probably the most perfect final film for a major movie star was "The Shootist" for John Wayne in 1976.

Wayne played an old gunfighter dying of cancer. Wayne himself would die of cancer only 3 years later, so he was sorta/kinda dying of cancer when he made "The Shootist." Its a good movie in which a number of favored friends and old co-stars(James Stewart, Richard Boone, Lauren Bacall) joined him on the screen to say goodbye.

"On Golden Pond" in 1981 was a great way for Henry Fonda to go out. He won an Oscar for that one -- his first and only Best Actor Oscar (daughter Jane had to pick it up for him, he was too ill to attend the ceremony.) Without "On Golden Pond," Fonda's final film might have been the Italian Jaws ripoff "Tentacles." Fonda died not too long after this award(Years? Months?)

But one other grand old male movie star got his "perfect" final film in 1981, and it ended up as a big, macabre surprise.

William Holden got top billing in SOB (for "Standard Operating Bullshit") a tale of the Hollywood wars directed by late middle-aged (old?) Hollywood writer-director Blake Edwards, whose heyday had been the 60's of Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Days of Wine and Roses and The Pink Panther, in tandem with his tres 60's music man Henry Mancini.

Edwards was nothing if not loyal. Mancini did the score for SOB; Edwards' wife Julie Andrews took second billing(and "took it all off" in a rather sexless topless scene); Bill Holden was wrinkled and on the fade since a comeback decade that had seen The Wild Bunch, The Towering Inferno and Network.

Indeed, it was probably those three titles(one from '69, two from the 70's) that earned Holden his top billing in SOB, along with his past as one of the biggest stars of the 50's(after two decades "moving up") with quite a few classics to his name (Sunset Boulevard, Born Yesterday, Stalag 17, Sabrina...The Bridge on the River Kwai.)

Blake Edwards had survived a 70's slump by bringing back newly hasbeened nutcase Peter Sellers in three rather TOO slapsticky "Pink Panther" movies, but then got a surprise non-Pink Panther hit right at the end of the decade with "10" (1979) which forsaw SOB in its emphasis on the sex lives of middle aged people(including Dudley Moore and, you guessed it, Julie Andrews). Soon Peter Sellers would die(1980) and the Pink Panther with him; Blake Edwards needed some new hits for the 80's.

"10" bought Blake Edwards the financing for SOB. SOB would flop but lay the groundwork for "Victor/Victoria" (with, you guessed it, Julie Andrews and Robert Preston moved forward from SOB.)

Blake Edwards kept going like a lot of Hollywood oldsters did -- as a "name" with a certain residual talent(he could still do slapstick with the best of them, sometimes) and a certain aging fanbase.

But back to SOB. The movie is at once very knowing and inside about Hollywood -- and yet too silly and broad to REALLY feel like "you are there." The film centers around a suicidal film director (Richard Mulligan, alternating drugged-up silence and crazed over the top wackiness) whose movie is going way over budget and for good reason: it looks terrible, even with Julie Andrews ta-tas. Drastic measures are called for.

William Holden is a cool cat producer who is inexplicably the friend of Mulligan's soggy sad sack. Holden -- once one of the most handsome men on screen -- still had a boyish million dollar smile and great , craggy voice -- but he just didn't LOOK too good any more -- wrinkles, sunken bubbles of bags under his eyes. He looked unwell.

But he used his charisma to show us the kind of old man who hangs on in Hollywood. During SOB, Holden scores hot young chicks(sometimes topless), and outfoxes studio bosses. He ends up in a "comedy trio" (Stooges? Marx Bros?) with Robert Preston (as a studio feelgood doctor) and Robert Webber (as a neurotic agent) which milks laughs out of "three old guys on a bender" (with a corpse in tow -- Weekend at Bernies about 8 years too soon.)

It all boils down to a big monologue for Holden when he tells his suicidal friend Mulligan: "Look, we're ALL committing suicide out here...some of us slower than others. Look at me, I drink too much, smoke too much, hook up with chicks too much, work too much..." (I paraphrased those lines, I doubt he said "hook up," but the meaning is right.)

And before 1981 was out -- maybe two months after SOB was released -- William Holden was dead. At 63 of alcohol but not the way we'd have thought. He was alone in a seaside highrise apartment he owned. He'd hit his head on a nightstand, opened a bloody wound and died because of drunkeness and blood loss. His body was discovered days later.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Sharp irony: had the studio held up on releasing SOB until, say, early 1982, they would have had the dark "sellling point" of it being "officially the final film of William Holden." As it was, SOB and William Holden rather "merged" in those dark months. His movie character was a controlled alcoholic, in real life he was an uncontrolled alcoholic who died alone, drunk.

It was a bad time in Holden's circle in general in 1981. His much younger girlfriend, Stephanie Powers(who claimed she was in it with Holden for the great sex, among other things) starred with Robert Wagner on the TV show Hart to Hart. Soon after Powers lost Holden, Wagner lost his wife Natalie Wood, in a famous scandal in which alcohol may have also played a role.

Blake Edwards was given the kind of "auteur power" to write his 80''s movies (sometimes with help) at about half speed. The man who had made the gigantic "Great Race" in the 60s to go along with his Pink Panther movies (along with the very funny The Party as a new vehicle for Sellers) was lower key, older in outlook, sticking around for his reputation in the 80's. He had a few hits in the 80's -- Victor/Victoria was huge(and Oscar nominated); Micki and Maude was a surprise.

But SOB stands alone in its weird mix of the sophisticated and the childish, a knowing Hollywood satire that seemed to have been made by an outsider who knew nothing about the system he had worked in for almost 30 years.

Good thing it has William Holden's final performance in it. (And Julie Andrews breasts. And some younger women's breasts. And Robert Preston. And Edwards personal dentist playing the dead man on the beach. And that dog. And even an aged Peter Gunn -- Craig Stevens -- from the early Edwards/Mancini TV hit.)

[–] DmitriKnipper (202) 2 years ago

But SOB stands alone in its weird mix of the sophisticated and the childish, a knowing Hollywood satire that seemed to have been made by an outsider who knew nothing about the system he had worked in for almost 30 years.

I love S.O.B., but one weird thing about it is that Edwards wrote the screenplay in the early 1970s (after frustration with films of his like Wild Rovers and Darling Lili being sliced up by studio heads) so, although filmed in 1980, remnants of the original time period of the script (references to Last Tango, Serpico, late '60s orgies, etc.) are still present.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I love S.O.B., but one weird thing about it is that Edwards wrote the screenplay in the early 1970s (after frustration with films of his like Wild Rovers and Darling Lili being sliced up by studio heads) so, although filmed in 1980, remnants of the original time period of the script (references to Last Tango, Serpico, late '60s orgies, etc.) are still present

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Aha. Well that explains it.

One danger for aging writer-directors -- without benefit of younger writers writing their scripts -- is that they could date themselves badly if they tried to write jokes or cultural observations.

Writer-Director Billy Wilder -- maker of quite a few classics, several times with William Holden -- fell prey to this with his near-end film The Front Page and his final film, Buddy Buddy. Both films starred Lemmon and Matthau almost as a "security blanket," both films were woefully dated in the jokes(especially Buddy Buddy.)

There were two solutions to this problem that neither Edwards nor Wilder wanted to take:

ONE: Hire a young hip screenwriter to write it.

TWO: Keep as much "cultural commentary" out of the movie as possible. (Alfred Hitchcock was big on this, he generally kept product placement and current events OUT of his movies, and they aged quite well accordingly. He also hired new young writers sometimes.

[–] DmitriKnipper (202) 2 years ago

Heh, I like the "hippies" in Buddy Buddy, lol. Even if the Wilder/Diamond script was sometimes awkward (especially the sex clinic Kinksi/Prentiss scenes), Wilder's comic timing was at least still intact.

Edwards did work with younger screenwriters in the 1980s like Dale Launer for Blind Date and Jonathan Reynolds for Micki & Maude. And Edwards' own 1989 screenplay for Skin Deep came off as fairly up-to-date.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Heh, I like the "hippies" in Buddy Buddy, lol. Even if the Wilder/Diamond script was sometimes awkward (especially the sex clinic Kinksi/Prentiss scenes), Wilder's comic timing was at least still intact.

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I guess. Its been years since I've seen Buddy Buddy but I recall thinking that in 1981 it was really the end of the line for Wilder(he'd been "carried" through the 70's on his reputation) and that Matthau and especially Lemmon looked dangerously out of date, too. (Both survived, and then prospered with Grumpy Old Men, but it was not really the same for them.)

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Edwards did work with younger screenwriters in the 1980s like Dale Launer for Blind Date and Jonathan Reynolds for Micki & Maude.

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Interesting, I did not remember that. I thought these "old guys" held on to their scripting powers until the bitter end.

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And Edwards' own 1989 screenplay for Skin Deep came off as fairly up-to-date.

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The "glow in the dark condoms" sequence had Edwards' "old flair" with slapstick, R-rated this time. I suppose Edwards rather decided to use sex as his survival tool in his later movies: 10, SOB(the Hollywood people; Andrews topless); Victor/Victoria(gay); Mickie and Maude, Skin Deep, and the remake of Goodbye Charlie with a man transformed into a young sexy Ellen Barkin.