S.O.B. (1981)

Film: S.O.B. (1981)

Stars: Julie Andrews, William Holden, Richard Mulligan, Robert Preston, Robert Webber, Robert Vaughn, Larry Hagman, Marisa Berenson, Stuart Margolin, Loretta Swit, Shelley Winters, Robert Loggia

Director: Blake Edwards

Oscar History: The film has a weird awards history, getting nominated for a WGA Award, a National Society of Film Critics prize for Preston, and a Globe for Best Picture, but also being cited for a Razzie for  

Worst Director & Screenplay.  Oscar didn't want to get its hands on such a polarizing picture & skipped it all-together.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

Last week we took a look at what would become a major cinematic renaissance moment for Julie Andrews, teaming up with her husband Blake Edwards for the smash-hit 10.  This would become a recurring theme for Andrews for the next several years, regularly leading Edwards films.  We've talked about a few of these on the blog (or some I've seen & not discussed...I watched movies before I started writing this blog, I have to admit).  The best and most successful of these films was Victor/Victoria, where Andrews plays a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.  The film was a critical & commercial smash, and won Andrews her third (and to date, final) Oscar nomination.  But as we only watch film I'd never seen before, we're going to talk a different film from this era, the movie that tried the hardest to crack the veneer of Andrews' squeaky clean image: S.O.B.

(Spoilers Ahead) S.O.B. is a pretty cruel sendup of the Hollywood machine.  We have Felix Farmer (Mulligan), who has produced what is sure to be a major flop called Night Winds after an unparalleled string of successes, many alongside his wife Sally Miles (Andrews), an, Oscar-winning angelic figure for the movies who is in the middle of trying to leave him, as Felix has gone mad while producing the movie. The first third of the film Felix tries to commit suicide, frequently to comic effect (at one point he falls on Loretta Swit's brassy gossip columnist & puts her in a full-body cast for the remainder of the picture), until it occurs to him-if they recut Night Winds, they can make it pornographic and play off of the public's titillation if Sally goes topless.  After Felix buys back the film from the studio, Sally has no choice and does, indeed, go topless.  Afterward, though, the studio realizes that this gimmick might work & go behind Felix's back to get the movie back, driving him mad, and leads him to standing up the studio with a toy gun...after which, in a shock, he is killed by real bullets from the police.  Felix is therefore dead, but the movie thanks to all of the publicity becomes a huge hit, with Sally winning another Oscar for the film.

The movie is vicious in the way it skewers Hollywood, oftentimes watching people stripped of their humanity as they try to find some way to scrounge a buck on a picture.  No one, not even Andrews' Sally, is a saint in the movie, though she does come the closest of the bunch.  The film is very funny, filled with black humor, and Preston & Winters provide the best comic relief of the bunch (both are terrific as soulless figures that know their way around the edges of Tinseltown).  Andrews in the center is hardly at her best, even if she's clearly playing a fictionalized version of herself (she's called "Peter Pan" quite often, perhaps to make it seem like she might be Mary Martin or Cathy Rigby, but, come on...she's Mary Poppins), but she's good.  The movie is good.  It's not great (it's meandering & a bit too long at parts), but it's not Razzie-worthy in any respect.

Andrews would continue to make movies and is still quite active today, nearly 60 years after she became America's Sweetheart.  A botched vocal surgery would rob her of her brilliant voice, but an appearance as Queen Clarisse in 2001's The Princess Diaries revived interest in the actress, and since then she's been playing some version of the Julie Andrews persona in everything from Shrek to Despicable Me to Bridgerton for a new generation.  She, like many of the women we've profiled in recent months, was able to escape Hitchcock's shadow & is hardly considered part of his legacy by modern audiences.  That will not be true on Monday, when we start our penultimate star of the year, a woman who would be defined by Hitchcock...but a star who would have more to say about Hitchcock's modern legacy than any of his leading women.