Plot
The story is a satire of the film industry and Hollywood society. The main character, Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan), is a phenomenally successful film producer who has just made the first major flop of his career, to the dismay of his movie studio, resulting in the loss of his own sanity. Felix attempts suicide four times:
- He attempts to die of carbon monoxide poisoning in his car, only to have it slip into gear and drive through the side of his garage, down a sand dune and into the Pacific Ocean.
- He attempts to hang himself from a rafter in an upstairs bedroom, only to fall through the floor, landing on a poisonous Hollywood gossip columnist standing in the living room below.
- He tries to gas himself in his kitchen oven, but is prevented from carrying out his intent by two house guests with other things on their mind. Thereafter he spends most of the time heavily sedated while his friends and hangers-on occupy his beach house. The occupation leads to a party which degenerates into an orgy.
- Finally, he tries to shoot himself with a police officer's gun but is prevented from doing so by the ministrations of a young woman wearing only a pair of panties. The experience gives him a brainstorm that the reason for his film's failure was its lack of sex.
Felix resolves to save both the film and his reputation. With great difficulty he persuades the studio and his wife Sally Miles (Julie Andrews), an Oscar-winning movie star with a squeaky-clean image, to allow him to revise the film into a soft-core pornographic musical in which she must appear topless. He liquidates most of his wealth to buy the existing footage and to finance further production. If he fails, both he and Sally will be impoverished, at least by Hollywood standards.
At first the studio's executives are keen to unload the film onto Felix and move on, but when Sally goes through with the topless scene and the film seems a likely success, they plot to regain control. Using California's community property laws, they get the distribution and final-cut rights by persuading Sally to sign them over. An angry and deranged Felix tries to steal the movie negatives from the studio's color lab vault, armed only with a water pistol. He is shot and killed by police who think the gun is real.
Felix's untimely death creates a crisis for his cronies Culley (William Holden), the director of Night Wind; Coogan (Robert Webber), Sally's press agent; and Dr. Finegarten (Robert Preston), who plan to give him a burial at sea. They steal his corpse from the funeral home, substituting the body of a well-known but underrated character actor who died in the first scene of the movie. Felix gets a Viking funeral in a burning dinghy, while the other actor finally gets the Hollywood sendoff many thought he deserved.
The epilogue later reveals that Felix's revamped film was a box office smash, and Sally won another Academy Award for her performance.
The movie within the movie
Little is seen of the movie which is the focus of the plot, except for an extended dream sequence and a brief shot close to the end. The title is Night Wind, which provokes the headline "Critics Break Wind" seen on a copy of Variety at the start of S.O.B. after the initial flop. The plot of Night Wind is kept vague; it involves a frigid businesswoman (played by Sally) whose inability to love a "male chauvinist" rival executive stems from a childhood trauma that led to her sexual detachment.
The climax of Night Wind is the first scene of S.O.B., an elaborate song and dance sequence set to "Polly Wolly Doodle", in which Sally wanders through a room full of giant toys (several of which come to life), singing the song while dressed as a tomboy. The implication is that her father's death caused Andrews's character to renounce childhood and become a cold, frigid person.
A second scene, taking place at the end of the film, has Andrews' character arrive at the home of her would-be lover after the dream, where he reveals that he still loves her, "despite everything."
When Felix rewrites the film to make it into soft porn, changes are made: Sally's character goes from sexually frigid to being a nymphomaniac. Her lover goes from male chauvinist to being a secret cross dresser. Felix axes the entire song sequence, turning it from a dream to a hallucination "… caused by a powerful aphrodisiac put into her Bosco" and replacing the regular version of "Polly Wolly Doodle" with a more haunting version. He has the "toys" dress in more erotic outfits, and includes a carnival barker-type muscle man (portrayed by S.O.B.'s choreographer, Paddy Stone), who tempts Andrews' character before she rejects him, by way of flashing her breasts.
Title
"S.O.B." (in the film) stands for "Standard Operational Bullshit" and refers to misinformation being the norm. The acronym also means "sexually oriented business" (if pertaining to strip clubs) and more generally "son of a bitch" (a ruthless person).[citation needed]
A Spanish dub of the film keeps the acronym S.O.B., claiming that it stands for "Sois hOnrados Bandidos" (You Are Honest Crooks). The Argentine title for the movie was changed to Se acabó el mundo (The World is Ended), having no relation to the original title.[citation needed]
Three years later, when Edwards had his name removed from the writing credits of 1984's City Heat, he was billed under the pseudonym Sam O. Brown. (S.O.B.)[citation needed]
Influences
When writing the screenplay, Edwards drew upon several of his own experiences. The character of Felix Farmer is a person not unlike Edwards, while actress Sally Miles bears certain similarities to real-life wife Julie Andrews (who plays her).[citation needed]
The story of S.O.B. parallels the experiences of Edwards and Andrews in their infamous, but Academy Award-nominated, failure, Darling Lili. Intended to reveal Andrews' heretofore unseen wicked and sexy side, that film had a troubled shoot, went significantly over budget, and was subjected to post-production studio interference. The early 1970s had more bad news for Edwards; he made two more movies, Wild Rovers, a western with William Holden, and The Carey Treatment with James Coburn. Once again, studio interference occurred and both films were edited without Edwards' input. Each opened to negative reviews and poor business. Hit hard by these events, Edwards went to Europe to work and to shake off studio interference. The plan worked, leading to successful projects including three "Pink Panther" sequels starring Peter Sellers.[citation needed]
In S.O.B., Andrews's character agrees (with some pharmaceutical persuasion) to "show my boobies" in a scene in the film-within-the-film.[12] For this scene, comedian Johnny Carson thanked Andrews on the Academy Awards for "showing us that the hills were still alive,"[14] alluding to a famous line from The Sound of Music opening sequence.[citation needed]
Reception
Critical response
Critical opinion of the film was sharply divided. In a remarkable contradiction, the screenplay was nominated both for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen and a Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay. It was also nominated for a Razzie for Worst Director and a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Comedy/Musical.[citation needed]
Today, S.O.B. currently holds a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with the consensus: "A sustained blast of unbridled vitriol from writer-director Blake Edwards, S.O.B. is one of the blackest – and most consistently funny – Hollywood satires ever put to film."[15]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote in his review: "S. O. B., Blake Edwards' newest, most manic, most bitter farce, is about the Hollywood you didn't see in the screen adaptation ofNathanael West's Day of the Locust. It's not about the smalltime failures, hustlers and nuts living on the sleazy fringes of the movie industry. Instead, S.O.B. has the class consciousness of a snobbish press agent. It's about sleazy, big-time wheelers and dealers who run the studios, who hire and fire people who make a million dollars per picture, and who cut a throat one day and the next day attend a gaudy, sentimental tribute to the fellow whose throat was so untimely cut. It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time. It opens today at the Coronet. Mr. Edwards, the man principally responsible for the string of successfulPeter Sellers-Pink Panther comedies, is here pouring out his heart -which pumps pure bile - about his own ups and downs with the Hollywood establishment of the early 70's. It was then that he made a string of flops, the biggest, most spectacular being his funny, stylish Darling Lili, which went so far over its budget that it almost sank the financing studio, Paramount Pictures, which also, by chance, is releasing S.O.B. But that's S.O.P. in Hollywood. It's difficult to remember a film as mean-spirited as S.O.B. that also was so consistently funny. The battling lovers in the Sidney Lumet-Jay Presson Allen Just Tell Me What You Want are Romeo and Juliet compared to the people in S.O.B., none of whom pays much attention to love anyway, unless it will have some effect on the box-office grosses."[16]
Versions
Several scenes were shot twice, one version for movie theaters and one for television. The party/orgy was shot for television with no nudity, and the erotic dream sequence was shot in a much milder version than the cinema version. The most remarkable difference involves a scene where Robert Vaughn, as studio head David Blackman, receives a phone call while in bed with his mistress. In the television version he is simply seen naked from the waist up. In the cinema version he gets out of bed wearing a bustier, nylon stockings and other transvestite paraphernalia.[citation needed]
Release
The original video release was made by CBS Video Enterprises in 1982, on both VHS and CED Videodisc, and was later reissued on VHS by CBS/Fox Video in the mid-1980s. Warner Bros. bought ancillary rights in 1989 with their purchase of Lorimar, and the film was released on Laserdisc through Warner Home Video in 1990.[citation needed] Warners released a DVD edition in 2002 and reissued in 2012.[17]
