Word: lemmon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Slade's protagonist is Scottie Templeton (Jack Lemmon '47), a divorced, once-promising writer who has squandered his talents on second-rate movies and television--and has had a damn good time in the process. Only his priggish 20-year-old son Jud seems to despise him; they haven't seen each other for two years when Jud comes to visit. Scottie wants them to spend time together, but Jud counters each of his father's jokes and suggestions with icy, detached monosyllables, preferring to journey off to a museum exhibit alone. Scottie's doctor arrives and breaks the news...
...roots of his fears--you know, the primal stuff. Tribute winds up pat and tidy, without plunging us into the existential abyss that can make this sort of thing a real corker. The tragedy of the American sit-com writer has turned out awfully shallow. This bathos gives Jack Lemmon his star turn: fast-food epiphany, downstage center. Neither he nor Slade really needed this--although it must be fun to break down onstage. Tribute slobbers when it ought only to quiver; the mask comes off and the jelly underneath dribbles all over the stage...
...already understand Lemmon's realization, and are deeply moved long before we are supposed to be. Now he simply perpetuates his chronic weepiness, the tears which won him an Academy Award for Save the Tiger. Throughout the evening, however, something very great is happening with Lemmon, and it's not obvious, because he looks extremely relaxed onstage, devoid of mannerisms, economical in his gestures, and highly expressive in his voice. He's playing a breezy juvenile again, with all that maturity and pained awareness forced under the surface, and though he does his damndest to keep the trembling from showing...
...flawless cast plays superbly off of Lemmon, especially Robert Picardo as Jud. Unafraid of being charmless or unendearing, Picardo gives a wiry, courageous performance which ultimately wins us over and holds its own against his formidable stage father. Director Arthur Storch provides one of the smoothest, cleanest pieces of staging I have ever seen--he also invokes splendid, precise comic timing from the entire cast. William Ritman's split-level set is sheer genius, both aesthetically and thematically. Like Scottie, it has something for everyone: paneled walls, lots of framed photos, ultra-modern but ultra-comfortable furniture, all in attractive...
...Apartment. Billy Wilder ("Some Like It Hot," "The Fortune Cookie," "One, Two, Three") likes to make comedies on grim subjects. ("Some Like It Hot" was about the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.) In this 1960 film an affable loser(Jack Lemmon)plays pim pin order to get a key to the executive washroom. Lemmon is perfect as the "schnook" who gets cornered into lending his apartment to philandering higher-ups in the Big New York Conglomerate in which he works. (Just a few years later, Lemmon, having played this role once too often, turned into a grotesque caricature of himself...