Blake Edwards

CHAPTER 3Mister Cory (1957)

Written and Directed by Blake Edwards

Mister Cory, the first film that Blake Edwards directed under his new contract with Universal after leaving Columbia, highlighted that Edwards was not pigeonholed as a comedy filmmaker at this early point in his career. Edwards’s previous films that he wrote and directed at Columbia had been under contract as Frankie Laine musical comedies. Although Edwards had written the screenplays for both, they had initially been scheduled to be directed by Richard Quine. However, when Quine moved into more prestigious projects, their direction fell to Edwards. After having demonstrated his talent with their direction, Edwards moved on to the prestigious Universal Studios. Mr. Cory is from this perspective the first film Edwards directed where he was free to work in a genre that he chose, and it is significant that it was “serious” drama and not comedy. Edwards did not envision himself as a comedy filmmaker but as a diverse filmmaker. His record of box-office and critical successes, however, quickly branded him that way and after the box-office successes of Operation Petticoat, The Pink Panther, and A Shot in the Dark, studios were reluctant to fund his other genre projects. However, he struggled throughout his career to make “serious” non-comic films, and he struggled against the widely accepted notion that comedy was not “serious.” He knew and repeatedly demonstrated that comic filmmaking was as serious an art form as ...