10

10; black comedy, USA, 1979; D: Blake Edwards, S: Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, Bo Derek, Robert Webber, Brian Dennehy, Dee Wallace-Stone

George Webber, despite having a great career as a songwriter and a good relationship with singer Samantha, falls in midlife-crisis at the age of 42. While driving his car, he spots a beautiful woman, Jenny, and loses his mind over her despite the fact that she just married David at a church. George finds out her name through the priest and visits her dad, a dentist, but the latter fixes six of George's cavities, which cause such a calamity that an intoxicated George joins a nude party at his neighbor's mansion. After an argument with Samantha, he flies to relax at some Mexican sea resort, but spots Jenny again and saves her husband who drifted away at the sea. The grateful Jenny wants to sleep with George, and reveals she is in an open-marriage, but George changes his mind and returns to Samantha.

A huge commercial success back in its time, „10“ is today on a rather shaky reputation and in reality deserves only a 5, though it is still a solid (erotic) comedy about the fear of andropause and "missing out in life", with a few deeper messages about how an ideal fling may not be better than a stable relationship. Director Blake Edwards included more and more lascivious humor in his later phase of career, which is more than obvious here in numerous nude scenes, which don't seem natural but somehow uneven and random. The film is quite sympathetic at first, yet it quickly proves to be an embarrassing vehicle for Dudley Moore since Edwards' sense for humor in such scenes where the old Mrs. Kissle farts and (especially) when George is all staggered and mumbles after a dentist fixed his six cavities proves to be mean-spirited and on a really low comic level. The major problem is that most of this is simply not funny, let alone for an overlong running time of 120 minutes. Edwards again forces too much humor from the main character stumbling into something or tripping onto something, since George Webber is not Inspector Clouseau, and more finesse would have been better (for instance, after George hears the information from a priest that Jenny's father is a dentist, the movie should have immediately made a cut to George at the dentist office, and simply deleted the contrived scene of George falling and then climbing up the hill to pick up the phone), yet the last third of the film is refreshingly smoother, under control, and some of the best jokes may be in minority, but they come swiftly – like when Samantha has a talk with her friend about George ("You know, we have practically nothing in common. We are the original Odd Couple!") or when a Mexican hotel employee is telling how the hotel had only one accident when „some idiot fell asleep on a surfboard and drifted away into the Ocean“, while Jenny's husband is precisely that. It's a pity Bo Derek's role as Jenny is so underdeveloped and thin, since she speaks up only some 90 minutes into the film (!) when her character is quite neat ("My father is just a bit right of Attila the Hun"). The role of Mary (Dee Wallace-Stone) who experiences George's erectile dysfunction is a bizarre episode due to her too dramatic speech about being a disappointment for men, all adding up to the feeling that Edwards' weight of talent cannot be sensed in this overstretched film.

Grade:+