Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

S.O.B. Blu-ray Movie Review

Show Me the Money

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 5, 2017

Blake Edwards' S.O.B. is best remembered for the scene in which Julie Andrews bared her breasts for the camera—an eye-popping departure for the G-rated star of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. On the Tonight Show, host Johnny Carson famously thanked Andrews for showing the world that "the hills are still alive", but S.O.B. is notable for more than just its star's bosom. Edwards was a peerless director of physical comedy in such projects as the Pink Panther series and the romantic farce 10. With S.O.B, he was trying something new, melding his gift for slapstick lunacy with the savage eye of a satirist. The result is unique in Edwards' filmography and, until it runs out of steam in the final act, exhilarating.

S.O.B. marked the fourth collaboration between Edwards and Andrews, who were married in real life and whose experience of making the 1970 flop Darling Lili inspired S.O.B.'s tale of a pricey musical gone awry. Having exorcised the ghost of Lili with S.O.B., the couple would go on to make a highly successful movie musical, Victor Victoria, which S.O.B. now joins in the Warner Archive Collection's library of Blu-rays.

S.O.B. is a show-business satire, and Edwards sets up his premise with three overlapping openings. The first is a saccharine musical number that Andrews performs over the film's credits as Sally Miles, a Julie Andrews-like movie star best known for wholesome family fare. The routine is an excerpt from Sally's latest project, Night Wind, produced by her husband Felix Farmer (Robert Mulligan) and directed by his friend, Tim Culley (William Holden), for the fictional Capitol Studios. Costly and extravagant, the film has just died at the box office. A Variety headline reports that "N.Y. Critics Break Wind".

S.O.B.'s second opening is supplied by a text crawl that summarizes the plot and sets the tone:

Once upon a time in a wonderful town called Hollywood there lived a very successful motion picture producer named Felix Farmer. He owned three beautiful houses, he had two lovely children, and he was married to a gorgeous movie star. The people who ran the studio where he worked loved him and admired him because he had never made a movie that lost money. Then one day he produced the biggest most expensive motion picture of his career . . . and it flopped. The people who ran the studio were very angry at Felix because they lost millions of dollars . . .

. . . and Felix lost his mind.

The third opening involves a jogger who suffers a fatal heart attack on the beach just behind the Farmers' Malibu residence. The lifeless body will lie there for days unnoticed, guarded by the jogger's forlorn pooch, whose selfless loyalty stands in stark contrast to the faithless humans populating the picture. (The jogger is played by Edwards' favorite bit player, Herb Tanney, who is here appropriately credited as "Stiffe".)

S.O.B. charts the increasingly frenetic fallout from Night Wind's failure, as studio head David Blackman (Robert Vaughn) struggles to limit the damage, star Sally Miles recoils from her husband's breakdown and producer Felix grows increasingly unhinged. After repeatedly trying to kill himself and failing, wreaking havoc on the house and its surroundings in the process, Felix is roused from his depression by the inspiration to reshoot Night Wind as a phantasmagoria of sex and perversion. "We gave them schmaltz", Felix proclaims. "They want sadomasochism!"

When the studio refuses to finance his inspiration, Felix does the one thing no producer should ever do, which is to fund the project with his own money. His reinvention of Night Wind triggers an avalanche of publicity and a feeding frenzy of maneuvering for advantage, as the industry slowly awakens to the possibility that the embattled producer may actually have a hit in the making. At the center of the storm is Sally, who is furious at her husband for staking the family's entire fortune on a hunch and is besieged by advisors whose main interest is advancing their own careers.

Edwards paints a broad canvas of greed, ambition and cowardice, and he fills it with a superb company of actors working as a seamless ensemble. Robert Preston, who would co-star with Andrews the following year in Victor Victoria, plays Irving Finegarten, the Dr. Feelgood in Felix's entourage, who is always ready with a custom cocktail of opioids or a witty non sequitur that, more often than not, passes over the heads of those around him. Shelley Winters plays Sally's agent, Eva Brown, whose name evokes that of Hitler's girlfriend and whose protestations of devotion to her client mask a ruthless pursuit of self-interest (she is reportedly based on legendary agent Sue Mengers, who responded to Edwards' depiction by publicly wishing for "an Alp" to fall on his house). Robert Loggia plays Sally's lawyer, who proclaims his loyalty the loudest at the very moment he's selling out his client. TV staple Stuart Margolin plays Sally's duplicitous assistant, for whom proximity to the star is just a stepping stone to becoming a Hollywood player. Robert Webber plays Ben Coogan, Felix's publicist, who melts into a quivering heap at the mere mention of shrewish gossip columnist Polly Reed (Loretta Swit). Larry Hagman, who was then at the height of his fame as Dallas' J.R. Ewing, is the studio head's chief lieutenant, a thankless job that lands him in the hospital (along with several other cast members). In a small but memorable turn, Marisa Berenson appears as the studio head's starlet wife, whose affair with a handsome leading man (David Young) is more about money than love.

For ninety minutes, Edwards juggles the overlapping schemes, subplots and pratfalls with effortless mastery, but then S.O.B. takes a sharp turn in its final half hour. Without giving away key plot points, one can say that the film switches away from Felix, whose manic energy has been the driving force propelling the action, and downshifts to let his three best friends—Preston's quack doctor, Holden's cynical director and Webber's craven PR flack—commiserate about the unfairness of life. They're a fine trio, but they can't hope to match the demented energy that propels the film when Robert Mulligan's Felix is at its center. Indeed, once Felix is relegated to the background, Edwards seems to lose interest in his jeremiad against the hypocrisies of Hollywood. Instead of maintaining his focus on avarice and mendacity, he devotes inordinate screen time to obvious jokes about bodily functions and a Burmese mystic who resembles the Beatles' guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The latter is played by Larry Storch in heavy makeup and an even heavier accent, and he seems to have stepped in from an entirely different movie.

Before it skids to a halt, though, S.O.B. achieves a madcap intensity that recalls screwball classics like Bringing Up Baby. It takes a genuine insider to produce great satire, and after more than two decades as a writer, producer and director, Edwards knew where a lot of Hollywood's bodies were buried. His acid portrayal of an industry driven by deceit, betrayal and, above all, greed hasn't dated, even as the players have changed and the technology has advanced. "You know this town, sweetie", says Sally's agent. "You could smoke dope and end up going steady with your Afghan, and you're just one of the gang." But lose money, and you're dead.

S.O.B. Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

S.O.B. was shot in anamorphic widescreen by Harry Stradling, Jr., who was Oscar-nominated for the widescreen photography of 1776 and The Way We Were. For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, the Warner Archive Collection commissioned a fresh scan, which was performed at 2K by Warner's Motion Picturing Imaging facility using a recently manufactured interpositive, followed by the usual color-correction and cleanup. S.O.B. joins the recent spate of exceptional Blu-ray presentations from WAC, featuring superior sharpness, clarity and detail while preserving the film-like quality of the source. The grain is exceedingly fine, except in the opening "Polly Wolly Doodle" sequence, where it is accentuated by the optically superimposed titles, and even there the grain is well-resolved and unobtrusive (see screenshot 10).

The film's palette favors the light earth tones of Seventies California decor, broken by darkness and deep reds that signal the disguised passions underneath. The brightest colors occur in the opening Night Wind sequence and then reappear in the ridiculously stylized nightmare created for the sexy reshoot, which concludes with Sally's breast-bearing. Bright colors also feature in the late sequence involving Sally's guru, for reasons that can't be discussed without spoilers. But perhaps the greatest virtue of the transfer is how faithfully it reproduces Edwards' most complicated frames, with figures arrayed from one end to the other and overlapping conversations and interactions being played out simultaneously. Such scenes are among the highlights of S.O.B., and this transfer renders them vividly. WAC has mastered the disc at its usual high bitrate, here 34.99 Mbps.

S.O.B. Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

S.O.B.'s original mono soundtrack has been taken from the magnetic master and encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. The track has good fidelity and dynamic range, and it provides the requisite impact for the sound cues that punctuate Edwards' sight gags. The dialogue is so clearly rendered that you can actually make out all the words in Felix's extended rant to Sally about his new vision, which ends with Sally screaming (for reasons unrelated to anything Felix says). The words still don't make much sense, but you can hear them clearly, and the rest of the dialogue is equally intelligible. The main score is by Edwards' frequent collaborator, Henry Mancini, who also orchestrated a memorable version of the traditional American ditty known as "Polly Wolly Doodle", which is hard to hear the same way after you've watched S.O.B.

S.O.B. Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The sole extra is the film's trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:51). Warner's 2002 DVD of S.O.B. was similarly bare.

S.O.B. Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Among the many pleasures of S.O.B. is its sly subversion of Julie Andrews' antiseptic image through the lens of Sally Miles. When we first meet Sally, she's so modest that she excuses herself if so much as a "damn" passes her lips. But as the pressures mount, both personally and professionally, she swears up a storm, rants about her "boobies" and betrays the man she loves for what she believes will be financial gain. (It is, albeit for others.) By the end of the film, Sally has become just another show business flake with an image in tatters, a private life in shambles and a shady spiritual leader telling her what to do next—and Andrews has become a deeper and more layered screen presence, ready for her closeup as the sexually ambiguous star of Victor Victoria. Despite its flaws, S.O.B. remains a unique and memorable achievement for both its director and its star, and WAC has given it a first-rate Blu-ray treatment. Highly recommended.