Word: matthau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Billy Wilder once ecstatically claimed that Walter Matthau "could play anything from Rhett Butler to Scarlett O'Hara." For more than a decade Matthau was as unpredictable as his facial expressions: an adamant sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a psychopathic killer in Charade, an ambulance chaser in The Fortune Cookie, the libidinous suburban husband in A Guide for the Married Man. Of late, his roles have yielded an amusing but unvarying character: the rumpled crank whose shpeesh shoundsh ash if it wash making itsh way around a shigar. Plaza Suite happily puts him in reverse. In Arthur...
Anyone defining schlemiel and schlimazel should consult a Yiddish lexicon or A New Leaf. Traditionally, a schlemiel is a person who spills the soup; a schlimazel is the one on whom he spills it. In this film the schlemiel is Henrietta (Elaine May). The schlimazel is Henry (Walter Matthau...
...joys of financial management. That leaves Henry with something of a vocation, but it does not leave the audience with much of a picture. Once the laughs subside, the project, like Henry's old wallet, is bare. A New Leaf may be the first film in which Matthau is miscast. He retains his unique webfooted shuffle, and still sends home his jokes special delivery. But his astringent lines ("That woman is not primitive, she is feral") belong on the palate of a George Sanders or a Clifton Webb, not in a sardonic side-of-the-mouth piece. Moreover...
...stage and film hits by Playwright Neil Simon. The Odd Couple is the one about the two men who split from their wives, share an apartment and unwittingly caricature their own fallibility as spouses. ABC was shrewd enough to cast Jack Klugman, the only possible substitute for Walter Matthau, as the slovenly sportswriter. This time around, his fastidious roommate is played by Tony Randall who, if not up to Broadway Predecessor Art Carney, is apter than Hollywood's Jack Lemmon. Pray for Simon's babies...
...star may be really dead. Consider the case of seven-year-old Charlie Matthau, who last week set up a lemonade stand in front of his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif. After a no-sale morning at 2? a glass. Charlie asked his father, a star named Walter, to sit on the sidewalk with him to draw some customers. "He wanted me to sit facing the traffic so people would see me and stop," Walter says. "I told him no. I'd sit facing the house." Charlie agreed, "That's O.K. People will know you by your background...