Blake Edwards dark psychological film about the effects of alcoholism on a previously happy marriage, starred Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. It has been described as "perhaps the most unsparing tract against drink that Hollywood has yet produced, more pessimistic than Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend"". The film gave another major boost to Edwards's reputation as an important director. "Darling Lili" star Julie Andrews married Edwards in 1969. While a few critics such as George Morris thought the film a major picture ("it synthesizes every major Edwards theme: the disappearance of gallantry and honor, the tension between appearances and reality, and the
Blake Edwards the American commercial cinema at the present time." Edwards' biographers, William Luhr and Peter Lehman, in an interview in 1974, called him "the finest American director working at this time." They refer especially to the "Pink Panther"'s Clouseau, developed with the comedic skills of Peter Sellers, as a character "perfectly consistent" with his "absurdist view of the world, because he has no faith in anything and constantly adapts." Critic Stuart Byron calls his first two "Pink Panther" films "two of the best comedies an American has ever made." Polls taken at the time showed that his name, as a director,