One of the funniest movies ever!
Added 9/10/2009
This movie is a gem! It is one of the darkest, funniest movies ever. Who knew Richard Mulligan had it in him?
Blake Edwards is a genius, and Julie Andrews is also marvelous in this film. "Victor/Victoria" is more well known, but this movie is funnier.
My favorite line:
Loretta Swit: Get out of here you shyster!
Robert Preston: Now Polly, I could sue you for slander! A shyster is a disreputable lawyer. I'm a Quack!
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S.O.B. dvd
Added 7/14/2009
DVD arrived quickly and my husband was thrilled. Hadn't seen it in years and a relative of his is in the movie. Thanks!
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Perfection
Added 5/20/2009
S.O.B. The film is very funny and has a very good cast. It is well worth the price paid. I shared it with my family and friends and they had the same opinion as I.
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Blake Edwards Gets Even
Added 3/12/2009
SOB is as good a send-up of Hollywood as any, easily better than The Player. Three extraordinary performances from William Holden, Robert Preston and Robert Mulligan hold the movie together in a veteran manic-comic mode that rocks back and forth between sly satire and outrageous farce. There is genuine corruption in all the characters and then there's Hollywood's special corruption centered in Robert Vaughn and Loretta Swit. It's a delicious film, lavishly turned out and patiently played. The Larry Storch funeral oration run in parallel with the Viking Funeral turns things upside down, as they should be.
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If Hollywood Doesn't Make You Crazy, It Kills You!
Added 1/1/2009
If you're looking to see Julie Andrews in a role such as Maria in the Sound of Music, don't buy this dvd. S.O.B. has nudity (a brief topless shot of Julie included...), sexual innuendo at every turn, drugs, homosexual references, sex-implied acts, profanity and bribery. But it's also a fast and funny story about a marriage that's crumbling amid the chaos of Hollywood and the friendships that swirl around it.
With lots of big name actors including William Holden, Richard Mulligan, Robert Preston, Larry Hagman, Shelly Winters, and Julie Andrews to name a few, S.O.B. is a movie that is still relevant. Hollywood egos still power the money-making machine, and people still give lip service to carrying about what happens to each other even while stabbing each other in the back.
The hypocracies of Hollywood are under a magnifying glass and it ain't all pretty, but it is funny!
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A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
Added 10/31/2009
This is clearly Blake Edward's most significant and most pleasant film. It has very little of the garishness, decadence, and sordidness that mar some of his other work, though I admire all of his cinematic projects.
I believe it would be fair to say that Victor / Victoria is about the moment at which art stops resembling life and becomes life. The hilarious cockroach scene is a beautiful instance of the traversal of the seeming / being distinction: The restaurant IS, in fact, infested with cockroaches if the patrons believe that it is. James Gardner feels duped at first---he is attracted to a man impersonating a woman, but that figure is, in fact, a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman. Later on, Gardner's character recognizes that it doesn't matter, ultimately, if Victor is naturally male or female. "Her" project is to contrive appearances of appearances---not to convince spectators that her appearance is natural, but to persuade them that her appearance is merely a convincing appearance, that her "truth" is purely phenomenal. How clever that the film alludes to Madame Butterfly! At times, the phenomenon is "realer" than any reality. "People believe what they see" - they ***want*** to be taken in by appearances and are inescapably disappointed by nudas veritas.
I think, in this regard, of Bernstein and Toddy: both characters are gay and yet also convincingly, almost natively heterosexualized. When they are wearing their "straight" masks, are they lying? Are they pretending? The film conjures up the ancient paradox of Megara: When liars say, "I am lying," are they telling the truth? A lie is not a lie if everyone believes it, including the liar him- or herself. I think of the wonderful bedside conversation between the Julie Andrews and ultra-masculine James Gardner characters: "I find it all fascinating. There are things available to me as a man that I could never have as a woman. I am emancipated... I'm my own man, so to speak."
The point, I think, is not that one appearance is a false and the other is "the truth," but that two mutually contradictory appearances can coexist simultaneously. Julie Andrews' character can switch from "Victor" to "Victoria" in the same way that some of "our" bilingual students switch from Spanish to English and then back to Spanish again. And why not? We live in, to cite one of the songs, a "crazy world / full of crazy contradictions," a world of shifting, ambiguous appearances that give life its thrill. Philosophically speaking, the film exhibits neither a pious, life-negating Platonism nor a Nietzschean celebration and aestheticization of hollow appearances. It suggests, rather, that you can shift from one phenomenal identity to another without either identity being "true" or emptily fraudulent. And why not? Humans are enormously complex creatures, and life is overwhelmingly ambiguous and complex.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
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Not that funny, although there were a few decent gags here and there (the travails of the French waiter come to mind) but the rest of it is disappointing. The musical numbers didn't even do Julie Andrews' voice justice as far as I am concerned. I watched it out of curiousity but don't see myself watching it again.
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The movie is very funny.
Added 9/5/2009
The movie is very good and I love Julie Andrews and James Gadner. Very funny.
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