Word: lemmons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Apparently she was recruited to lend a little weight to a mean, shallow and indifferent enterprise. The Prisoner of Second Avenue is a listless nervous-breakdown farce, adapted by Neil Simon from his play about the traumas and indignities of living in Manhattan. Jack Lemmon, unwired and wrung out, appears as an lid executive who loses his job and proceeds to crack under all the usual New York tensions, from unruly cab drivers to walls that crack like eggshells, from vicious neighbors to violence in Central Park. Bancroft plays his wife, loving and impatient and reasonably brave, who sees...
...time "Ben Hecht was leaving for Hollywood." But neither Hecht nor MacArthur could be expected to countenance what has been done to their original. Dialogue that should crackle like a telegraph has been slowed to the listless deliberation of a traffic cop writing out a ticket. Jack Lemmon makes a curiously enervated Hildy, and Walter Matthau's Burns is a shambling cynic too similar to his Odd Couple characterization for comfort...
...being given a splendid revival in Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum Theater, with Walter Matthau in the role of the vainglorious Captain Boyle, Jack Lemmon as his bar "butty" Joxer, and Maureen Stapleton as his earth mother wife Juno. How did this particular production come about? Matthau and Lemmon had wanted to do the play for some tune, preferably with Stapleton. They approached Gordon Davidson, the energetic artistic director of the Mark Taper, and gave him a commitment for a five-week limited run, which was sold out by opening night...
...suspected informer. With these mundane materials, O'Casey unleashes a torrent of engulfing emotions. The actors are up to the challenge. Though he sometimes seems about as Irish as chopped chicken liver and onion on rye, Matthau is full of baleful Gaelic braggadocio as Captain Boyle. As Joxer, Lemmon is as spry and cunning as a soiled city sparrow, and for once, Maureen Stapleton acts from her heart rather than her frazzled nerve ends. Let loud praise for all be heard, for it is much merited...
...result, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz operates on a very different level than does, say, Save the Tiger, in which Jack Lemmon plays an all too aware salesman who realizes that the only way he can escape bankruptcy is to set his clothes factory on fire and collect insurance on the damage. The balancing of financial exigencies with the principles of fair play make for a far more sophisticated handling of moral tension than takes place in this movie about a boy "still soaking behind the ears...