The Great Race (Warner Bros., Patricia-Jalem-Reynard Productions, 1965)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 4) Turner Classic Movies ran a double bill of both the films Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis made together, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Blake Edwards’s The Great Race. Alas, since my husband Charles and I were late getting home from a meal, we missed the start of Some Like It Hot but caught all of The Great Race. The Great Race was based on a real-life event: a 1908 cross-country auto race from New York to Paris. The route traveled westward across the United States, up the coast of Canada to the Bering Strait, over which the cars would be transported 130 miles on a ferryboat. (At least that was the original plan; ultimately the route from San Francisco to Alaska was traversed by ship, as was the journey across the Pacific to Japan.) Then the cars made it across Russia through the right-of-way of the Trans-Siberian Railway, after which they went through Europe and finally ended up in Paris. As the Wikipedia page on the real race notes, “Ahead of the competitors were very few paved roads, and in many parts of the world no roads at all. Often, the teams resorted to straddling locomotive rails with their cars riding tie to tie on balloon tires for hundreds of miles when no roads could be found.” Blake Edwards and his co-writer, Arthur Ross, loosely based their story on the real race and even made the “Leslie Special,” the car driven by the film’s hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis), visually resemble the Thomas Flyer that won the actual race, though unlike the Thomas Flyer it was painted white with gold trim and even its tires were white instead of the regulation black. Edwards’s film details the long-standing rivalry between the heroic Great Leslie and the villainous Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), whose repeated attempts to assassinate Leslie, including shooting an arrow through Leslie’s hot-air balloon and torpedoing Leslie’s speedboat with which he’s trying to set a world water speed record, all end in spectacularly comic reversals. (One of the film’s anachronisms is that Leslie’s speedboat has a deep-dish steering wheel from the 1960’s rather than 1908. Another one is the appearance in a scene set in 1908 of a phonograph playing the title song of Sigmund Romberg’s and Oscar Hammerstein’s operetta The Desert Song, which wasn’t written until 1926.)

The Great Race had a 160-minute running time, one of a number of hyperthyroid slapstick comedies for which there was a brief vogue kicked off by the mega-success of Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Into its running time Edwards and Ross threw in a lot of comedy elements, including a barroom brawl in Boracho, Arizona (a town to which the various drivers repair to get gasoline); a scene in which both Leslie and Professor Fate, along with Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood), the film’s heroine, and Fate’s sidekick Maximilian Meen (Peter Falk, in a role quite different from his iconic one as police lieutenant Columbo), and their cars are trapped on an iceberg across the Bering Strait; an extended spoof of the classic story The Prisoner of Zenda in which, trapped in the Ruritanian kingdom of Carpania, whose capital is Pottsdorf, Professor Fate is forced into substituting for the alcoholic crown prince, Frederick Hoepnick (also Jack Lemmon), in the coronation ceremony; a duel, first with foils and then with sabers, between Leslie and the villainous Carpainian official Baron Rolfe von Stuppe (Ross Martin); and a giant pie fight in the kitchen of the Pottsdorfian palace that lasts four minutes on screen but took five days to shoot. Edwards made the mistake of using real cream pies for the scene instead of fakes made of shaving lotion (the usual on-screen expedient), and compounded his error by not having the mess cleaned up after the first day of shooting. Needless to say, the cream in the pies spoiled and the set had to be aired out to get rid of the stink before shooting could resume the next day.

There’s also an engaging subplot in that Maggie DuBois is an aspiring reporter seeking to land a job with the New York Sentinel and also a militant feminist determined to cover the great race start to finish. To do that, she buys a car of her own, a Stanley Steamer, and enters the race herself, though her car burns out in the southwestern U.S. desert and Leslie rescues her, very reluctantly. Leslie tries to seduce her with some of the lamest lines Edwards and Ross could think of. Maggie gets her revenge by handcuffing Leslie’s sidekick Hezekiah Sturdy (Keenan Wynn) to a post inside a Southern Pacific railroad car – Leslie and Hezekiah don’t reunite until the race reaches Russia – and ultimately she and Leslie have an even more extended than usual of the standard hate-turns-into-love courtship so common in movie rom-coms. Also along the way the performers stop to do two songs written by Henry Mancini (Edwards’s long-time collaborator since the 1950’s TV series Peter Gunn, which Edwards created and for which Mancini wrote the iconic main theme) with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. One is “The Sweetheart Tree,” a sappy romantic ballad which Edwards was clearly hoping would become an enormous hit at the level of “Moon River,” a previous Mancini/Mercer song from an earlier Edwards film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It didn’t, though surprisingly both songs were sung on screen by female movie stars who had barely acceptable but reasonably pleasant voices: Audrey Hepburn for “Moon River” and Natalie Wood for “The Sweetheart Tree.” (To add to the irony, both women played the leads in major musical films – Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Wood in West Side Story – but in both those roles, Marni Nixon was their voice double.)

The other big song is the awkwardly titled “He Shouldn’t-A, Hadn’t-A, Oughtn’t-A Swang on Me!,” a denunciation of domestic violence that sits rather awkwardly in a film set in 1908, when men still had the legal right to beat and even rape their wives. Like Buddy and Ella Johnson’s great late-1940’s R&B hit “Hittin’ on Me,” it’s a song in which a woman singer – Lily Olay (Dorothy Provine, star of a short-lived TV series called The Roaring Twenties) – boldly asserts her right not to be beaten by her man. I can’t help but wonder if Mel Brooks, who made Blazing Saddles nine years later at the same studio (Warner Bros.), deliberately mashed up the character names “Lily Olay” and “Baron von Stuppe” to create “Lili von Schtupp,” the spoof of Marlene Dietrich played by Madeline Kahn (brilliantly) in Blazing Saddles. (“Schtupp” is also the Yiddish word for “fuck.”) Another set of running gags in the film is the built-in cannon in Professor Fate’s car, the “Hannibal-8” (whose name is explained in the novelization of the film, though not in the movie itself, as a reference to the historical Hannibal, who successfully conquered the mountains of northern Italy by having his army travel by elephants), which goes off at the most inopportune moments. It regularly blows apart Professor Fate’s garage, and at the very end of the film – after Professor Fate has technically won the race, but only because Leslie threw it by stopping inches before the finish line to kiss Maggie and thereby convince her that he really loves her – it knocks down the Eiffel Tower. I’ve seen The Great Race quite often, and I remember attending an auto show in San Francisco in the mid-1960’s that exhibited the prop cars used in the film (whose tires had treads that spelled out the words “NON SKID”), and despite the rather arch nature of much of the humor, I still enjoy it.