Word: matthau
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...down comedian, sitting in a wheelchair that makes him seem foolish but never funny. With Lemmon immobilized, only a miracle could save the show from being as sedative as Wilder's last picture, Kiss Me, Stupid. Fortunately, something like a miracle is at hand: Walter Matthau. A magnificent comic actor too long misused as a minor cinemenace, Matthau last year played such a spectacular slob in The Odd Couple that he made himself a major star of the U.S. stage. As the icing on Wilder's Cookie, he should also be accepted as one of cinema...
Lemmon loses his mobility only two minutes after the picture begins. Cast as a CBS cameraman who is clipped while covering a Cleveland Browns football game, he wakes up in the hospital confronting the saurian sneer of "Whiplash Willie" Gingrich (Matthau), an ambulance chaser who, by the look of his crummy clothes, has been chasing them on his hands and knees. Willie's skin is as grey as the towel in a night-court lavatory, but his ideas are crisp and green. As the cameraman's brother-in-law, he loyally announces: "We're going...
...while, of course, Actor Matthau is leering, sneering, sniggering, swaggering, popping his optics, slopping his chops and generally behaving like the Nero of the Nuisance Claims Division. In the end, Willie receives a different sort of check from the one he expects, but until fate mows him down he offers what is certainly the season's lushest crop of crass...
...even curiouser is that eleven domestic pictures were submitted to the Lincoln Center selection committee, and all were rejected as "not of festival caliber." Then it turned out last week that the selectors had tried to get one Hollywood picture, The Fortune Cookie (with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau), only to be turned down by the distributor, United Artists. That prompted Cookie's producerdirector, Billy Wilder, to suggest that United Artists was "scared of the snobbish, intellectual types of audiences and critics" in New York. "After all," he quipped, "my picture was not made in Czechoslovakia...
Arthur Hill plays much the same part in Harper that Walter Matthau played in Charade. He's so mild-mannered you can't avoid suspecting him, but Hill in any guise is marvelous...