Word: matthau
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They just look funny. Jack Lemmon: personification of the Excedrin headache, his sinus cavities almost visible, the corners of his mouth wrenched in a clown's grimace as the voice machine-guns a blast of staccato croaks. Walter Matthau: the epitome of slob insouciance, a flophouse face and shaggy-dog body, wearing clothes like rumpled bed sheets, maneuvering across a room like a hunchback tiptoeing on roller skates. To see either one is to smile; to see them together, in The Fortune Cookie or The Odd Couple or here, working variations on the Mutt-and-Jeff theme...
...MATTHAU AND CLAYBURGH try to sneak through this barrelling plot, hoping that if they just read their lines, no one will notice that they are even in the movie. As usual, Matthau lets his flabby-cheeked scowl and floppy jackets substitute for any real characterization. He makes it clear that Snow has a messy desk, a messy marriage and a mess manner--and he lets it go at that...
Clayburgh lacks whatever rumpled charm Matthau manages to muster. She builds her few funny lines into heavy-handed moral treatises that collapse under their own weight...
...actors get no help from their director. Neame paces the film by putting a five-second pause between each line of dialogue, as if he were going to splice in an audience laugh track but forgot at the last minute. The dead time only further highlights the inanities Matthau and Clayburgh spit at each other. In an effort to create the stately atmosphere of the high court, Neame relies almost exclusively on close-up, static shots of the two principals inside their chambers. Without any camera movement, he creates a Bergman-like claustrophobia--ridiculously out of place in this comedy...
Finally, instead of concluding the mess, Neame merely returns to the writers' tired mix of bland humor and semi-meaningful moralizing. Loomis and Snow, now buddies, enter the court, grinning. She whispers, "You and I make each other possible." Matthau seems too bored to respond...