bkoganbing One of the curious things about S.O.B. is that while it has an incredibly good name cast, there is no real star of the film. Julie Andrews gets first billing because she's the director/producer's wife and after her William Holden has the biggest marquee name so he's second. But if there's a star in this film it's Richard Mulligan because it's on his troubles that the plot of S.O.B. turns.Mulligan came in for a lot of criticism as the frantic film producer who after a string of hits, totally loses his mind. So much so that his movie star wife, Julie Andrews, is leaving him. The first half of the film involve some hilarious attempts at suicide, the best being when he falls through the floor of his beach house trying to hang himself and flattens nosy gossip columnist Loretta Swit. Julie Andrews is basically cast as a movie star like Julie Andrews who gained her fame and popularity with wholesome entertainment like Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. During an orgy/party that his good friend, cheerfully hedonistic director William Holden has at Mulligan's house while on suicide watch, Mulligan gets a brainstorm and decides to redo his last G rated film as soft core porn with Julie Andrews displaying her glockenspiels. Mulligan gets crazier and crazier as the film now becomes a battle between him and studio head Robert Vaughn for control of the film. It all ends quite wildly indeed. A lot of people say Richard Mulligan overacts and chews the scenery. But that's what the part calls for. He no more does it here than Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters at their zaniest. A little fine tuning in his performance might have helped, but the director who should have done this was busy elsewhere.Instead of Blake Edwards doing it himself, he should have begged Billy Wilder to do this film. S.O.B. is the greatest Billy Wilder film that Billy Wilder never directed.Besides those mentioned such luminaries as Shelley Winters, Robert Webber, Marisa Berenson, Stuart Margolin, Craig Stevens, Paul Stewart, Larry Hagman and Robert Loggia play various Hollywood types. But the best by far in the cast is Robert Preston as the Doctor Feelgood to the stars. It's a variation on the conman Harold Hill he played in The Music Man only he's far more cynical. When Preston is on screen, he dominates the film.S.O.B. was the farewell performance of William Holden. Knowing the senseless way Holden died after completing the film, you twinge when you hear him cheerfully tell Richard Mulligan how he drank enough booze to kill a dozen healthy livers. Still S.O.B. was a good film to leave on for him.I enjoy what Blake Edwards did with the talented bunch he assembled for this film. It would have been perfect if Billy Wilder had done it though.

inspectors71 Seeing this movie as a 21 year old was not a good idea. I was literate and mature enough to understand that this was an adult satire, but I was too much of a little boy to understand the grownup-ness of the characters. Ultimately, my 48 year old mind understands that I missed something in SOB, but I can't get by the quarter century old memory of thinking that this Blake Edwards comedy was a dud.I do remember laughing. And Rosanna Arquette's stripping in front of William Holden ("If that's nothing, I can't even conceive of what 'something' might be!"). There was lots of sharp dialogue and slapstick. Julie Andrews looked, well, perky, but by the time she did her newsworthy strip, what little attention span I was paying to the movie had spooled out. Yet that's all I remember. A lot of insider jokes and bared breasts. This isn't so much a review as a confession that I didn't get the movie. I remember feeling faintly disgusted with Mary Poppins popping out, in a repulsive, leathery musical number. I had a narrow window of opportunity to get SOB, but I missed it.I'm not really interested in giving it another shot.

Bill Slocum "S.O.B" had great promise when it came out in the summer of 1981. Director Blake Edwards, who was on a winning streak, used his greatest professional disaster, a bomb he made with wife Julie Andrews 11 years before called "Darling Lili," as the basis for an all-star satire on shallow loyalties and bottom-line mentalities in Hollywood. The newspaper ad featured a cartoon bull in a director's chair, smoking a cigar with the legend "The bull hits the fan July 1." Oh, yes, and Andrews was making her topless debut, too. It seemed all too cool to be true, and was. "S.O.B." never caught fire, and watching it 25 years later is to understand why. It's a comedy that forgets to be funny.Richard Mulligan plays moviemaker Felix Farmer, whose latest picture "Night Wind" is in serious trouble after previews. ("N.Y. Critics Break 'Wind'" is the headline in Variety.) At first falling into a suicidal funk, he then gets the idea to reshoot the film as an erotic spectacular, deciding that sex sells and giving the public what it wants means getting his wife, Sally Miles (Andrews), to show them her breasts. As excitement builds for this second "Wind", hard-charging studio boss David Blackman (Robert Vaughn) decides to use whatever foul means he can to steal Farmer's film out from under him."S.O.B." boasts an all-star cast of TV actors like Mulligan and Vaughn whom Edwards and the script throw out on the screen with lame one-liners they scream at the top of their lungs. Loretta Swit as a gossip columnist is the worst offender. William Holden in his last film wears ugly sunglasses and seems a frail shadow of the actor he was only a few years before in "Network," leaving most of the foreground to Robert Preston, who adds a touch of class and gives "S.O.B" its few decent lines as a drug- and wisdom-dispensing doctor."If he doesn't remember me, mention his first case of the clap," he says of Blackman. "I didn't give it to him, I cured it!""S.O.B." doesn't work as a comedy because it doesn't really try to be a comedy. Instead, Edwards rubs old sores over "Lili" and tries to get even with the people who clipped his wings long ago. Maybe it worked for him. If someone told him back then that he couldn't make a worse film than "Lili," then he proved them wrong here."S.O.B." has a lot of repetitious gags, like a hole in a floor people keep falling through. A flaccid score by Henry Mancini kills any lingering affection you may have had for that old number "Polly-Wolly-Doodle." Mulligan's overacting is embarrassingly bad and shticky, and the narrative is advanced in the form of unrealistic television reports, including a live bulletin when Sally Miles is getting ready for her nude scene.Andrews' breasts are the fifth- and sixth-best reasons to see "S.O.B" (Rosanna Arquette and Marisa Berenson appear topless here as well). But there's not much else to perk your interest, unless you enjoy seeing a good director sacrifice his art for the sake of purging his bitterness. "S.O.B." is as sad as the faithful dog we see on the beach, mourning his dead, forgotten owner and serving as a thematic device for the heartlessness of the other characters. It's appropriate in one way: "S.O.B." is a D.O.G.

simona-11 Although it's been quite a long time since I last saw the movie, some scenes will always remain present and lively in my mind: Felix Farmer trying to kill himself in that big house crowded with party guests who have only one thing in mind, sex, which finally inspires him to re-launch his life and his movie; and his final voyage on the back seat of a car (if I get it right) through Los Angeles, now really dead, to a Normannic funeral. Besides all the big names, we should never forget Richard Mulligan, a great comedian who sadly passed away five years ago, who is really the heart of this wonderfully messy, funny, intelligent movie.