Word: lemmons
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Young Jack Lemmon sits behind the wheel of a convertible in his first film, a 1951 public-service short called Once Too Often. He looks a pleasant fellow, someone to prize as a neighbor in the sunny suburbia of the postwar era. His behavior is that of any blithe burgher: a carefree puff of his cigarette, a heavy foot on the gas pedal, an appreciative glance at a lovely lady as his car draws alongside hers. Then the scene cuts to black and...CRASH!, a sickening fusion of metal and flesh. What begins as comedy, and accelerates toward romance, explodes...
Such was the arc, starting at the apogee and crashing into disillusionment, that Lemmon's characters described in almost 50 fertile years of films. At his death last week, at 76 from cancer, he was fondly elegized as the mostly decent guy up against the New Morality--which is to say, the No Morality. He was the adman in Days of Wine and Roses, watching alcoholic fumes rise from the wreck of his career and marriage. In The Apartment and many pictures that followed (The Out-of-Towners, Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome, JFK), he played a businessman...
...master of comic timing, of the buttoned-down double take. That flummoxed look paired nicely with his ricochet vocal rhythms--he'd race through phrases, then put a twist on the crucial word. Unlike most other Hollywood actors, who relax and seem to bathe in their star quality, Lemmon worked hard. He let you read his reading of the character. His acting was less about being than about doing...
...this wasn't mere technique. High hammery wouldn't have earned Lemmon two Oscars and six nominations, plus an Emmy last year for Tuesdays with Morrie. It was instead an acute perception of his characters: men drowning in flop sweat and flailing magnificently as they go down for the last time...
...saddest things about Lemmon's passing now is that Matthau, who died last July 1, is not around to remind us how lucky Matthau - and the American moviegoer - was that Lemmon found the courage, so many times, to make us all wince...