Perfect family movie is fun from beginning to end.

Lemmon plays it dirty throughout and for huge effect. Curtis underplays for equally comic effect. Wood comes through on a par with the two male stars.

It's highly inventive, self-conscious camp, made in 1965, well before the genre wore itself out in superciliousness.

A relatively disappointing film, The Great Race is nevertheless one that Blake Edwards dreamt of making for years , the pure cartoon that his previous films foreshadowed. Was he wrong to strive increasingly towards the cartoonish?