Classic Movie Review: The Odd Couple
By Josh Spiegel
September 1, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
A while back, when I reviewed The French Connection, I noted that one of the great pleasures of cinema is listening to Gene Hackman get riled up and yell. That I forgot to mention Walter Matthau’s yelling is my fault, but please add him to that list. His anger is almost always played for humor in the latter stages of his career, and begins in earnest with The Odd Couple, the 1968 film that helped transform his persona. Most people, before the film came out, associated Matthau as a heavy. In this respect, he’s completely comparable with Humphrey Bogart, an actor who was one of the mobsters without a lot of lines in his early films, until movies like High Sierra and Casablanca came around. For Matthau, it was movies like The Odd Couple and a screen partner named Jack Lemmon who turned things around.
Matthau’s performance as Oscar Madison is the very personification of bluster. When, in a climactic argument on a rooftop, Oscar grabs the collar of his fussy friend Felix Unger and shouts, “Don’t you understand? I don’t want to live with you anymore!”, he infuses it with such anger, such frustration, and such annoyance that it goes from being justifiably furious to incredibly funny. I’m sure we can all think of someone we know who, when they get angry, you can’t help but laugh at; it’s not because they’re wrong to be angry or what they’re angry about isn’t worth it. It’s just that…this person is funny when they’re angry. So it goes for Walter Matthau. He is understandably angry at his buddy, but you can’t help but laugh at how cartoonish he is in expressing his feelings.
But then again, you can see why Oscar is so angry at Felix. If you’re not familiar with the concept behind The Odd Couple (first a play, then this movie, then a popular TV show, followed by a sequel to the movie, and on and on), here’s the fill-in: Oscar is a sloppy sportswriter who has been divorced for about half a year. Felix is one of his poker buddies, a newswriter for a TV network; as the movie begins, he has just been tossed out by his wife, driven crazy by his neat-freak tendencies. Because Oscar and his friends worry that Felix will attempt to kill himself (something they’re not wrong about, by the way; the opening of the film shows Felix pathetically and poorly trying to commit suicide), Oscar takes his friend in until he can find an apartment of his own. Humor ensues as their personalities clash.
The Odd Couple is one of the most enduring stories of the past 45 years; that may sound like silly hyperbole, but I’m willing to say it’s not. As I mentioned, the movie was first a play (Matthau reprised his role from the Broadway stage, but Lemmon took over for Art Carney); it spawned a sitcom starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, had a sequel 30 years after its release, and what’s more, the play is still being performed. Ever since the story was rewritten for the opposite sex, it’s become even more long-lasting. Last year, at the school where my wife teaches, the high-schoolers put on a production of a show whose premiere on Broadway may predate their parents. So what is it about The Odd Couple that works so well 40 years after the fact?
Relatability is the answer. We all know a slob, and we all know a neat freak. (Hell, you may be the slob, or the neat freak. I’m somewhere in the middle.) We’ve all been annoyed with slobs, and the same with neat freaks. Granted, we may not have as many ways around a snappy one-liner, but the frustration and anger is still there. It is impressive, however, that the writer of the story, the great Neil Simon, is able to turn such comic gold from what could be truly bleak material. Weirdly enough, the weakest part of the film is the opening ten-minute sequence, which is almost completely wordless and features an appropriately mopey Lemmon walking around New York City. There’s a bit of dark humor to be had from his failed attempts at suicide, but there’s only so many ways you can wring laughs from that.
Once the film enters Oscar’s apartment (which is where about 90% of the action takes place on screen), the movie gets moving, and fast. Oscar is surrounded by his other poker buddies, and they talk and talk and talk. What’s so impressive about the dialogue in The Odd Couple is that it manages to be as funny today as it must have been back in the mid-1960s. Unlike characters in something from, say, Aaron Sorkin, the characters in Simon’s play are hilarious and smart without ever seeming to know that they’re being hilarious or acting especially clever. Oscar, Felix, and the guys who make up the poker table are all intelligent, and all manage to come up with funny lines, inside jokes, or gags, but it’s done so effortlessly that you almost feel like you’re sitting in on the game and just waiting for your turn to call or raise a bet.
That Lemmon and Matthau are both excellent should go without saying. One of many reasons why both men had a career resurgence in the 1990s, with such comedies as Grumpy Old Men, Grumpier Old Men, Out to Sea, and The Odd Couple II, was because of the chemistry they had as a team. Most of those movies aren’t particularly good - the only moment I remember from Out to Sea is of a door being shut in Matthau’s face - but they featured two likable, charming lead actors in movies that managed to be charming and not at all challenging. The Odd Couple is both of those things, but it’s also incredibly funny. Lemmon and Matthau managed to have completely different personas here, and ride that throughout their lengthy partnership as co-stars.
They’re supported strongly here by John Fiedler (a New York actor known for his role in 12 Angry Men and for being the original voice of Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh shorts), Herb Edelman, Larry Haines, and Carole Shelley (as one of two British widows Oscar tries to woo), among others. But the show is Lemmon and Matthau, and the two of them on-screen at the same time. The first few minutes in Oscar’s apartment are funny, but we’re all really waiting for them to be in the same scene. The longer and longer you wait makes the actual time they have even more enjoyable, even funnier, even more of a relief. Don’t be fooled by the cheesy poster - which turns their faces into a frightening bit of faux-frustration - and prepare to laugh more than you think.
Lemmon and Matthau would have successful careers for years after The Odd Couple, but it’s kind of criminal that Matthau was known, for the most part, as a comic performer for the rest of his career. Yes, in the mid-1970s, he made two notable dramas - Charley Varrick and the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three - but most people think of him as the crabby but lovable coach in The Bad News Bears or the lovable scamp of the Grumpy Old Men films. He’s great in those roles, but they’re too easy. Even in The Odd Couple, a straight comedy, his work is a little more difficult. In some ways, watching him in his later years is like watching a piano prodigy sleepwalk through playing one of his great pieces. The notes are right, the music sounds fine, but he could be doing so much more. As lamentable as it is, we should all be thankful for Matthau’s talent and his work in The Odd Couple.