Word: matthau
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Cactus Flower answers one of the less pressing but more engaging questions facing America today: Can Laugh-In's Goldie Hawn really act? Yes, she can, and so can Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman. With that kind of cast, a Sears, Roebuck catalogue could serve as a script, and Cactus Flower is far more than that. Director Gene Saks is no Billy Wilder, but Wilder's collaborator I.A.L. Diamond (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) is still I.A.L. Diamond, and he knows funny lines when he writes them. Ornamenting Abe Burrows' stage hit (itself an adaptation...
...York, a bachelor dentist named Julian Winston (Walter Matthau) enjoys the benefits of a towheaded gamine, Toni Simmons (Goldie Hawn). How can he elude the marriage trap? Simple: by telling Toni that he is already bridled with a wife and saddled with three children. Suspicious, the mistress demands to see the wife. Winston persuades his spinster nurse, Stephanie Dickinson (Ingrid Bergman), to pose as Mrs. Dentist. Byzantine complications add a flush to Stephanie's sallow countenance, but the complications are purely formal. Once Bergman zeroes in on a male lead, the light comedienne should pack her gags...
...Perhaps most missed will be Goldie Hawn, that dizzy cream puff who is constantly blowing her lines. Because of her Laugh-In exposure, she landed a feature role in her first movie, Cactus Flower, in which she appears with Ingrid Bergman and Walter Matthau. Next come two more movies and two television specials that, swears Goldie, will be the last. She seems to mean it when she says, "A movie is serious business-it's more important than a television show...
...three later pictures, The Apartment (1960), Irma La Douce (1963), and The Fortune Cookie (1966), Wilder again provides nice sympathetic victims (Jack Lemmon in the first two, Ron Rich in the latter). But, perhaps to counteract this, he makes the victimizers increasingly grotesque. Walter Matthau's conniving lawyer Whiplash Willie in the recent Fortune Cookie is Wilder's most terrifying caricature of humanity. Matthau, constantly shifting his eyes trying to locate the quickest buck, fails to say one generous thing during the entire picture. The cruelties of this character, as you might expect, contrast sharply with the mild evils...
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 8:30-11 p.m.). Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau made dough in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie (1966), even though the show was rather crummy...