Film

The Great Race

Name: The Great Race
Genre: Comedy, Adventure, Action, Romance, Western
Released: 1965
Cast: Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Keenan Wynn

The Great Race is Blake Edwards' gigantic, affectionate throwback to silent-era melodrama and Mack Sennett slapstick — Tony Curtis as the spotless white-suited hero, Jack Lemmon cackling under a villain's mustache, racing automobiles from New York to Paris the impossibly long way round. It's loud, silly, gorgeously overlong, and contains the biggest pie fight ever filmed. Pure widescreen comfort food, not wit.

TMDb rating

7.1

If you liked this

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Lemmon and Curtis in their defining comic partnership, years before Fate and Leslie — faster, sharper, and just as fearless. Essential if you love either actor here.

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Something you would not have found on your own.

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James Garner at his most charmingly self-aware, sending up the Western with the same affectionate, tongue-in-cheek tone Edwards brings to melodrama here.

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If Fate and Leslie's cartoon morality tickled you, Mel Brooks pushes genre-spoofing several steps further into outright anarchy and top-tier one-liners.

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Same bones as the film you just watched — a hazardous, mismatched journey across brutal terrain where the vehicle itself might kill you — but played dead straight, as unbearable tension instead of slapstick.

A genuinely nerve-shredding thriller about truck drivers hauling nitroglycerin over mountain roads — the dark, serious mirror of every 'race across dangerous terrain' premise, this one included.

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The General1926

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Buster Keaton performing his own insane, precisely engineered stunts atop a moving locomotive, with a purity of visual comedy that still gets gasps a century later.

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