10 (1979)

Film: 10 (1979)

Stars: Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, Bo Derek, Robert Webber, Dee Wallace

Director: Blake Edwards

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Original Score, Original Song-"It's Easy to Say")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Julie Andrews-click here to learn more about Ms. Andrews (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After the twin, high-profile flops of Star! and Darling Lili, Julie Andrews had gone from one of the biggest box office insurance policies in Hollywood to being something of a risk.  The films that she'd made in the 1960's that were such massive hits like Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were out-of-fashion, and indeed it wouldn't be until decades later that high-quality musical productions would become trendy again.  She was offered the lead role in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which she turned down initially before trying to get it back (it would go on to be a hit for Angela Lansbury), and had a failed TV project in 1978.  Throughout the decade, she only made two movies: The Tamarind Seed and 10.  The weird part about this part of her career, though, is that both of these movies were successes.  Tamarind Seed, though forgotten today, made a lot of money (though due to profit-sharing deals with Andrews & her director/husband Blake Edwards, the studio didn't make a lot of cash off of it), and 10 was a blockbuster.  So while this is considered a sleepy portion in Andrews' career in movies, the movies she did make were a big deal.  Of the two, 10 would be the more significant picture in her career (and the biggest hit she'd do with her husband), so we'll be profiling that for our tribute.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about George Webber (Moore), a brilliant singer-songwriter who is having a midlife crisis after his longtime girlfriend Samantha (Andrews) throws him a birthday party.  He is constantly thinking about sex & the meaning of life, and for him those two things collide when he sees a beautiful woman named Jenny (Derek) getting married, someone that he rates an "11" on a scale of 1-to-10.  The film shows initially George & Samantha being in a tumultuous relationship, but we soon learn that they need time apart, and they break up.  During this breakup, George travels to Mexico following Jenny and her fiancee on their honeymoon.  While there, he saves Jenny's fiancee from a shark, and while he's recovering the two become friends.  Jenny seduces George while listening to Bolero, but when he finds out that she's in an open marriage, and not the idealized version of womanhood he thinks she is, she breaks it off because he is in love with the vision of her, not with the real woman.  Afterward, finally growing up & realizing that Samantha is the love of his life, they reconnect, wiser & a bit fractured, but likely to remain together this time.

There are moments in 10 where Moore's scenes with Derek might be about something other than the male gaze & the misogyny that comes with it, but the film doesn't allow itself to focus on that, seeing Derek's free-thinking, sexually-liberated Jenny as a sign that Moore should become more conventional than the other way around.  This is a pity, because Derek, the least of these three actors in the long run of their careers, does something special here with Jenny, making her feel like a real woman after Edwards' camera had made the entire audience look at her as nothing more than the sum of her body parts.  She's not a great actress, but I get why she became a star from this movie as there's something magnetic that she brings to this specific part that's impossible to deny.

The rest of the film falls apart without this sort of insight.  Yes, Moore & Andrews are good (they usually are), but the sexism that runs through this is too much for me, and the comedy (where women are nothing more than props) is a gigantic yawn.  I bemoan the prudishness of modern cinema as much as anyone, but this is not the world we want to live in, where George has to find women to validate him.  I want a cinema more like Jenny's, complicated-but-free.

The film won two Oscar nominations, both of them quite good.  Henry Mancini does fine work with the score, though I'll be honest here-Revel is doing such heavy-lifting (the "Bolero" scene between Derek & Moore is the best part of the picture) that I'm surprised he was eligible.  The song "How Easy is That" comes at the exact perfect time, Moore & Andrews singing it as a duet toward the end of the movie.  It ties the film together nicely & is quite melodic.  This period of movies frequently had this kind of easy-listening tune toward the end of the movie & I didn't always feel it, but here it totally fits what we've seen before.  Next week we're going to finish off our month devoted to Julie Andrews a few years after 10, in one of the films that would bury once-and-for-all the squeaky clean demeanor that Andrews had been sporting since she first graced televisions as Cinderella.