Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames (Danny Gold Productions, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Monday, January 5) I watched a PBS American Masters program on the late writer, director and (briefly) actor Blake Edwards called Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames. It was made in 2024, 14 years after Edwards died, and director Danny Gold chose to focus it mostly on the long-term relationship between Edwards and his second wife, Julie Andrews, whom he started dating in 1968 (after the breakup of their first marriages, Edwards to actress Patricia Walker and Andrews to set designer Tony Walton), married a year later, and stayed with for 41 years until his death. Edwards was born William Blake Crump in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 26, 1922, and reportedly his father left his mother even before he was born. His mom, Lillian Grommet Crump, remarried to Jack McEdward, son of important silent-film director J. Gordon Edwards, and in 1925 McEdward moved his family to L.A. to work in the movie business. Blake Edwards recalled sneaking onto movie lots and playing amongst the false-front exteriors. He graduated from high school in 1941 and went for a career as a movie actor, of which he said later, “I worked with the best directors – Ford, Wyler, Preminger – and learned a lot from them. But I wasn't a very cooperative actor. I was a spunky, smart-assed kid. Maybe even I was indicating that I wanted to give, not take, direction.” I wrote about one of these credits, Frank Wisbar’s PRC “B” horror film Strangler of the Swamp (1945), and liked the film overall but said of Edwards, “Blake Edwards is a competent leading man, though he offers nothing here that would lead us to question the wisdom of his subsequent career change to writing and, ultimately, direction (and his presence here puts Rosemary La Planche one degree of separation from Peter Sellers!).” In between acting stints Edwards served briefly in the U.S. Coast Guard and injured his back, which put him in pain for years afterwards.

Edwards then decided to take up writing and made his reputation on the network radio series Richard Diamond, Private Detective, a vehicle for Dick Powell after his sensational success as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet. Richard Diamond, Private Detective ran from 1949 to 1953. Later Edwards developed a similar show for TV, Peter Gunn, which ran from 1958 to 1961 and spawned the iconic main theme by Henry Mancini. Edwards recalled that he wanted to work with Mancini after hearing his score for the Orson Welles film Touch of Evil (1968), and they worked together for decades after that. Mancini asked Edwards for permission to write the Peter Gunn score in jazz style, and Edwards happily obliged. Edwards also broke into feature-film direction with two of Columbia Pictures’ attempts to make stocky singer Frankie Laine into a movie star, Bring Your Smile Along (1954) and He Laughed Last (1955), but in 1959 he got his first foray into “A”-list filmmaking with Operation Petticoat, a World War II service comedy starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Edwards was mostly known as a comedy director, including the 1962 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. It generated the legendary hit song “Moon River” (which Hepburn sings in the film in her own voice; she’s not a great singer but her voice is right for the context and the song), though it also features an obnoxiously racist stereotype of an Asian landlord played (wretchedly) by Mickey Rooney. (Edwards later apologized for this.) In the early 1960’s he took forays into darker material like the Hitchcockian thriller Experiment in Terror (1962) and the alcoholism drama Days of Wine and Roses (also 1962) with Jack Lemmon in one of his rare serious roles.

In 1963 he made The Pink Panther, which started out as a comedy about jewel robbery starring David Niven in a retread of the Raffles character he’d played a quarter-century earlier, but the character audiences remembered and wanted more of was the comically inept French Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers). Edwards and the Mirisch brothers, who’d produced the film for United Artists, spun off a sequel, A Shot in the Dark, also featuring Sellers as Clouseau. Later Edwards made a particular favorite of mine: The Great Race (1965), starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood in a light-hearted spoof of a real-life 1908 auto race from New York to Paris – westbound across the U.S., north through Canada and Alaska, over the Bering Strait’s natural ice bridge, then through Russia on the right-of-way of the Trans-Siberian Railway and finally across Europe to Paris. (I like to think of this as the “other” Jack Lemmon-Tony Curtis movie, after Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.) Oddly, The Great Race is referenced here only through brief clips of the famous pie-fight scene Edwards, a devotée of silent comedy in general and Laurel and Hardy in particular, inserted into an elaborate spoof of The Prisoner of Zenda as the race takes the central characters through Ruritania on the final leg of their drive to Paris. Edwards worked with Sellers again in The Party (1968), which took its lumps then and now for the “yellowface” casting of Sellers as an (East) Indian who crashes a Hollywood party. In 1969 Edwards’s career took a major nosedive with his film Darling Lili, starring Julie Andrews (in their first direct collaboration) as a British music-hall entertainer in World War I who’s really a German spy. Danny Gold hails this film as a forgotten masterpiece (I haven’t seen it since it came out and I’m not sure what I’d think of it now) and particularly enthused over the opening shot, which shows Julie Andrews’s face as a pinprick on an otherwise black screen until the camera pulls closer and her face expands to fill the screen. Gold hailed that as hugely innovative when it was obviously a ripoff of the opening of the “Lullaby of Broadway” number in Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935.

Co-starring Rock Hudson, Darling Lili was a commercial bomb, and so was Edwards’s next movie, Wild Rovers (1971), a light-hearted Western with William Holden, Ryan O’Neal, and Karl Malden – which ran into a chainsaw when liquor tycoon Edgar Bronfman bought MGM. Bronfman hired James Aubrey, who’d previously had a rocky tenure as program director for CBS, to run MGM, and Aubrey set up his own cutting room and proceeded to re-edit most of the films being made at the lot, including Wild Rovers. After a few more financial disappointments, including The Carey Treatment and The Tamarind Seed, Edwards decided that his way back to bankability would be to revive the Inspector Clouseau character and make Pink Panther sequels: The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). Then he hit the jackpot with “10” (1979), starring Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, and Bo Derek as the perfect “10” woman over whom Moore’s character obsesses. Edwards and Andrews again collaborated on S.O.B. (1981), in which Andrews plays an over-the-hill actress whose director (William Holden) insists that she go topless in one scene. Their next film together, Victor/Victoria (1982), was another transgressive comedy, based on the German film Viktor und Viktoria (1933) and its British remake, First a Girl (1935), in which a woman (Julie Andrews) is picked up by a Gay man (Robert Preston) and trained to work as a female impersonator: a woman playing a man playing a woman. She attracts the attention of gangster James Garner, who falls in love with Victoria a.k.a. Victor even though he’s informed by his fellow gangsters that “the Mob don’t consider homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle.” Edwards confessed that he’d fudged things a bit by showing Garner’s character seeing Andrews’s fully frontal in a shower and therefore he knew all along that she was a woman. When he redid Victor/Victoria as a Broadway musical in 1995, with Andrews repeating her role, he took out this compromise.

I’ll give Danny Gold points for one aspect of this movie: he shows all of the Edwards/Andrews children – two (son Geoffrey and daughter Jennifer) his by Patricia Walker, one (Emma Walton Hamilton) hers by Tony Walton, and two Viet Namese girls they adopted after they found they couldn’t have children together – making a surprising degree of success out of being a “blended family.” He even includes some of the many home movies the couple took, though ironically they had two cameras at their wedding (a video camera up close and a film camera farther away on a hilltop) and both malfunctioned. Edwards even called on the officiant to do a retake of their marriage, but the second take didn’t come out any better than the first. I’ve enjoyed a number of Blake Edwards’s films over the years even though I don’t really consider him a great filmmaker, but I still liked this tribute to him even though there was a bit of special pleading about it as if Danny Gold were deliberately trying to raise Edwards higher in the pantheon of filmmakers than he strictly deserves.