Tag: Jack Lemmon

The Apartment (1960)

“And the girl…?”

The romantic comedy changed with those three little words in “The Apartment.” Shirley MacLaine played “the other woman,” the scandalous character who always broke up the true love. But here, she was the lonely girl forgotten by the love of her life, cast out, neglected and contemplating suicide. How did we miss her?

Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” is one of the groundbreaking comedies of all Old Hollywood. It gave the screwball comedy severity. Its characters were lonely, depressed and scummy, and it found a funny color amidst all the blue, proving to be heartwarming and filled with emotional pathos.

Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an office drone in a movie that would inspire the image of the working man for decades to come. The desks stretching to infinity was inspired by King Vidor’s silent film “The Crowd,” but Wilder’s numerical facts of a singular employee in a massive insurance company seem to paint a broader picture of his workforce servitude.

To move up in the world, Baxter has agreed to a deal with the executives. They can use his apartment as a haven to take their mistresses. The company’s head-honcho, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), promotes Baxter for the same reason, but his mistress is the lovely Fran Kubelik (MacLaine), the spritely elevator girl with the short haircut Baxter has a crush on.

The interesting thing about Baxter is that he’s living a lie that he’s not actually living. His neighbors and his landlady both think he’s a rambunctious party animal bedding a new girl each night and polishing off several bottles of liquor as well. He does need to wake up and smell the coffee, but for different reasons than his neighbors believe. We see him living completely mundanely, changing the channels on TV in the hopes of watching “Grand Hotel” only to be teased with more commercials. And in the short time he earns these new promotions, he earns none of the extra money, still straining pasta with a tennis racket and washing martini glasses by hand. When he takes another lonely woman home from a bar on Christmas Eve, he’s doing so out of complete depression. He’s like the guy not invited to the party but forced to clean up afterwards. Continue reading “The Apartment (1960)”

Rapid Response: The Odd Couple (1968)

There’s always an issue today with watching movies from the ‘60s and ‘70s that later turned into TV shows. People like my Mom and others have greater memories and penchants for the spin-offs than they do the actual source material, and this is true of “MASH,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and now I learn “The Odd Couple.”

The whole pitch for the TV show “The Odd Couple” was that it was a pairing of two men, one a slob and the other a neat freak. HOW WILL THEY EVER GET ALONG?!? (sitcom hilarity ensues) I’m sure there were some homosexual undertones in there as well.

But the film, which is strikingly faithful to the Neil Simon play of the same name, is really about more than opposites attracting. Simon calls up the problems that can arise in marriage through people who know each other too well and grow to hate each other’s quirks. The simple difference here is that the woman’s role is switched.

And Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau know each other all too well. The slovenly nature of Oscar’s (Matthau) apartment is exactly what makes their weekly poker games fun and Felix’s (Lemmon) oddities are exactly what make him a likeable lug (even if he does wear his seatbelt at a drive-in movie).

This “optimistic sarcasm” between friends feels very natural, and the screenplay, also by Simon, is wonderfully written. Oscar and Felix thrive as friends purely because of Simon’s witty and self-deprecating back and forth.

Points can also be awarded to the film over the show for simply having two comic actors with wonderful chemistry, Lemmon and Matthau. They were a common screen-pairing going well into the ‘90s, and together they made some good and not very good movies.

Lemmon especially is terrific. He’s always been a wonderfully versatile actor, and his dramatic chops give the film an added dimension of darkness in the opening montage in which he tries to kill himself. The film’s first shot shows Lemmon wide, and yet we can easily tell how glum he looks. And then with one line to the hotel clerk, “Do you have anything higher,” we know precisely his intentions. He’s a master, and he follows through his neuroticism with a sheer pluck and confidence in his physical comedy.

“The Odd Couple” just expired on Netflix Instant, which is a shame, but I guess it’s possible some people would prefer to watch the TV show anyways.