Blake Edwards

CHAPTER 12 The Late Period: Play It Again, Blake

Blake Edwards directed his last film, Son of the Pink Panther, in 1993. The film got bad reviews and did poorly at the box office except for Italy, where Roberto Benigni, the film’s Italian star, was very popular. From a traditional auteur perspective that would mark the end of his career. But for Blake Edwards as a multi-hyphenate, multimedia creator and for us as scholars embracing that approach to his total career, it marked the beginning of an extremely productive and unusual final phase in his late period. Within two years he would be back as the writer-director-producer of Victor/Victoria: The Musical (1995) on Broadway, an adaptation of the film Victor/Victoria which he wrote and directed in 1982. He then followed this with an out-of-town tryout production of a new musical he wrote, produced, and directed, Big Rosemary, another musical adaptation, this time of the second film he had written and directed, He Laughed Last (1956). He stayed highly active as a screenwriter and playwright of unproduced works until his death in 2010. During those years, he also placed a new emphasis on the public exhibition of his works as a painter and sculptor.

It is not uncommon for serious filmmakers in their late period to reflect upon aspects of their mid-period career. Such accomplished filmmakers as John Ford and Clint Eastwood, for example, took a revisionist approach, reconsidering their representations of such things as race, gender, ...