I still love it. It’s clean(at least relative to today’s comedies) fun, silly and slapsticky. Don’t expect subtlety. I love it and the similarly themed “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” from the same time period.
After you watch it, please let us know what you thought of it as an adult.
Also, “Those Magnificent Men & Their Flying Machines”
Well, I probably didn't LOL as much as I did when I was 12, but now I probably appreciated some things I didn't back then.
Jack Lemmon RULED! Great performance(s)!
Natalie Wood was stunningly gorgeous.
Tony Curtis played it just right.
Great color look to the film.
The whole thing was lots of fun.
“The Great Race’’, “It’s A Mad,Mad,Mad, Mad World’’. Those were great pictures, saw them as a kid. “The Russians Are Coming’’(We run aground in Soviet Navy Russian submarine boat’’, egermancy, egermancy everybody to get from street!’’) “Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines’’ was another great one. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore. That was a different time, a different America. Lately I’ve been trying to put into words or thought about how it is America has changed and I think I can see that now. I remember those days. There was a feeling of, I dunno, optimism, of new things happening or on the horizon, that ‘’can-do’’ feeling. There was still so much innocence and, well, decency in mainstream art and entertainment, certainly not the vulgarity there is now. I think in part because many of the writers of those screenplays, guys like Mel Brooks were of the “Greatest Generation’’ and had those values of decency and good taste and there were lines not to be crossed. That America is gone, it vanished.