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Ask comedy king Blake Edwards, this year's honorary award recipient, how he develops a visual gag and he'll tell you that much of his youth was spent in theaters watching Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy: ''I went to school there, and my salvation was there.'' He'll reminisce about acquiring wisdom as a young man from comic great Leo McCarey (Duck Soup, The Awful Truth). Is his acute sense of timing instinctual? ''No,'' he says, ''I learned it.'' From pros like Jack Benny. And he practiced, practiced, practiced.

Here's a snapshot of how good a student he was: Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau in 1964's A Shot in the Dark suavely twirling a globe, then getting his hand horribly and hilariously mangled. The stunningly choreographed party scene in 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's (which took eight days to shoot). A rug-encased Richard Mulligan descending through a hole in a ceiling in 1981's S.O.B. The cockroach sequence in 1982's Victor/Victoria (whose script earned Edwards his only Oscar nomination), brilliantly observed from outside a Paris restaurant so the interior chaos is even funnier.

One can go on and on about Edwards' comedic gifts, but that would ignore his range. 1962's Days of Wine and Roses, starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick (both Oscar-nominated) as a couple who meet cute, then fall horrifyingly into the gutter, is still one of the bleakest films ever about alcoholism. The chilling Experiment in Terror (1962) and 1967's underrated Gunn (based on Edwards' TV series) are juicy noir. The autobiographical That's Life! (1986) is both funny and poignant, with an incandescent performance by Julie Andrews, Edwards' wife of 34 years. Even 1970's Darling Lili is an elegant delight despite studio tampering that still pains Edwards.

Now 81, the man hasn't slowed down. ''The older and the more desperate you get, the harder you should work,'' he says. ''In the last year, I have written a play, a musical, two screenplays, and a rewrite for a possible remake of [1979's] 10.'' For the boy who grew up wanting to match his masters, school is never out.


Posted Feb 06, 2004 | Published in issue #749-750 Feb 06, 2004 | Order Article Reprints