The Great Race (1965) may have been dedicated to "Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy," but the film is truly director Blake Edwards' loving tribute to the slapstick style of earlier silent comedies. The film features all the hallmarks of earlier silent comedies including a dastardly villain, a spotless hero, and outrageous and thrilling stunts. Tony Curtis stars as the hero, "The Great Leslie," a daredevil and adventurer who enters a 1908 road race starting in New York City and going west to end at the Eiffel Tower in Paris. In pursuit are Leslie's arch-nemesis Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon) and his henchman Max (Peter Falk). Natalie Wood stars as the film's damsel-in-distress, Maggie DuBois, an early feminist who sets out to report on the race and ends up shuttling between the attentions of the Great Leslie and the clutches of the evil Professor Fate.

Director and co-writer Blake Edwards had just made two of the most popular comedies of the early sixties--The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964)-- and with The Great Race, the director wanted to salute the source of that slapstick on a grand scale. "This is a kind of cartoon I've presented with real-live people," Edwards remarked. "There is a humor in this now that was somewhat inherent in The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark but there is almost an unbelievable humor in that you allow things to happen to people, that they could not survive in a million years, for the sake of a laugh."