"10" (1979)

Blake Edwards's "10" was released in the final weeks of the 1970s, and for a moment the film was everywhere. Back then, everywhere meant billboards, newspapers, magazines and television, where it was a staple of conversation for talk show hosts like Johnny Carson, known in those days as America's sandman. "10" is among a number of Hollywood films that came out in the 1970s and 80s that I never saw and, in an effort to better understand those born just before the Baby Boom, I am trying to catch up on.

By today's standards, "10" would never get past the elevator pitch. Dudley Moore plays George Webber, a suddenly middle-aged, successful playwright/composer with bratty tendencies living alone in Beverley Hills, where he entertains his singer-actor girlfriend Samantha (Julie Andrews, above) when not writing songs at his lyricist's Malibu beach house. George gets everything he wants, and yet he remains unsatisfied -- until he catches a glimpse of a young woman (Bo Derek) on the way to her wedding and, as in classical mythology, he sees in her face an ideal ("An 11," as he tells his shrink).

Through various trickeries, George learns who the woman is (her name is Jenny) and he pursues her on her honeymoon to Mexico (we would call this stalking today), where he saves her husband from drowning and, because Jenny is a thoroughly liberated woman, she invites him into her bed while her husband is recovering in the hospital. It is there in bed (with Ravel's "Bolero" playing) that Moore's old world morality catches up with him and he leaves the situation unconsummated and returns to L.A. to reconcile with a justifiably mistrusting Samantha, eventually winning her back (we presume).

As in many Blake Edwards films (it was Edwards who made The Pink Panther, 1963, and The Party, 1968), there is, like L.A. itself, an expedient yet numbing plot line freeway with off-ramps that lead to vital neighbourhoods rich in mystery and intrigue -- places where life happens. There are also numerous shadings that are timed to stick with the viewer. Samantha's feminism is intelligently articulated, if not embodied; a Mexican hotel guest who fails to seduce George points out to a bartender (a little too whimsically) that men seem to do better as they get older, while women just get older. Another human moment is conveyed in a phone call between George and his lyricist Hugh (Robert Webber), who has decided to end his relationship with his much younger boyfriend and advises George not to do the same with Samantha: "Don't do as I do, George, do as I say ..."

Those who have never seen this film will likely know it through the speechless swim-suited body of Bo Derek. The pairing of that kind of body with the Olympian number 10 is, in these quick-to-signify times, enough to curl our lips and keep us scrolling. But to do so is to miss some insightful vignettery. The freeway, as we know, is no way to see the world, yet the plot of "10", like that "information superhighway" known as the internet, has in some ways liberated us, allowing us to move from one exit to the next. Yes, freeways are unpleasant things to be on, just as the internet too has unpleasant consequences -- both of which need to be addressed. But not here. Not at this exit. At least not today.