Blake Edwards

CHAPTER 10 The Tamarind Seed (1974)

Written and Directed by Blake Edwards

While we were visiting Edwards on the set of his 1988 film, Sunset, he told us that, as a way of sustaining his long creative career, “I’ve had to keep re-inventing myself.” That perceptive comment provides an ideal approach to The Tamarind Seed, which not only reflects a major transition in Edwards’s career but also presents central characters who are coping with fundamentally transitional points in their lives. Ken Wales, the film’s producer, told us about the origins of the project. Edwards wanted to do an adaptation of The Green Man by Kingsley Amis but Sir Lew Grade had given Julie Andrews a copy of The Tamarind Seed, written by a woman, Evelyn Anthony: “So, Blake says, ‘We can get that. As a matter of fact, Lew Grade really wants to do that and he wants Julie because he’s always wanted to do a film with Julie.’ Suddenly a new angel was appearing on the scene. Somebody that would fund the movie, Blake could direct it, Julie could star in it, and I’d produce it. So, I read it and I said, ‘Well, that looks good.’” Ironically, the Julie Andrews character is seen reading an Amis novel in The Tamarind Seed.

At its deepest level, The Tamarind Seed is a film about remaking, on the part of its creators as well as the central characters who reconstruct their lives fully aware of the perils involved.¹ This was the first theatrical film that Edwards directed in the wake of the deeply distressing production ...