S.O.B.

Edwards' crowning achievement. It is a wickedly funny, impeccably cast, ingeniously subversive satire of the Hollywood film industry.

This movie has teeth, and it's not afraid to bite. [6 July 1981, p.7]

S.O.B. is one of the most vitriolic – though only occasionally hilarious – attacks on the Tinseltown mentality ever.

This is by no means the first film, nor the first film about the movie industry, in which the epitome of emotion is represented by a character talking on the telephone while oral sex is being performed on him. [3 July 1981, p.19]

Though, like many of Edwards' films, it lurches uncertainly from slapstick farce to mordant humour in an extremely hit-or-miss fashion, this surprisingly bitter satire on Tinseltown - in which a producer (Mulligan) beefs up his latest turkey of a movie by introducing some pornographic sex scenes and having his wife/star (Andrews) bare her breasts on screen - does hit the mark once or twice.

The problem with S.O.B. is that it reveals another sort of failure on Edwards' part: his fondness for dwelling on this low point in his career. He neglects to update the scenario or liberate it from the self-pity he overindulged in at the time. In fact, it's residual self-pity that undermines S.O.B. as a promising satire of Hollywood mores and hypocrisies. Edwards' tendency to feel sorry for himself keeps intruding on the potential wackiness. [2 July 1981, p.C1]

It's a satire inferior to the thing it satirizes. [3 July 1981]