New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

In the annals of film history, there are great couples and there are great couples. Some are well-known today not for the movies they were in but for the relationship they had off-screen. These days, we’re enamored with couples like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but just because they’re attractive. Couples like Tracy and Hepburn & Bogie and Bacall are known for their classic pairings in films like Adam’s Rib and To Have and Have Not. These two couples had amazing chemistry on-screen and off. Then there are couples in buddy films; the list includes people like Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby, and so on. For me, though, there’s one couple that tops that kind of list, and only the one: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Lemmon and Matthau starred together in ten films over their careers, but the most notable is The Odd Couple.

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.

Continued:       1       2