Word: simon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...COUPLE, by Neil Simon. Walter Matthau and Art Carney, two middle-aged newly de-weds, share living quarters and watch their friendship go on the rocks for precisely the same reasons that their marriages did. The play, on the other hand, is convulsively successful, thanks largely to deft construction by Playwright Simon (Barefoot in the Park) and daft direction by Mike Nichols...
Playwright Neil Simon (Barefoot in the Park)- at a cocktail party two years ago when he spotted just the guy he had been looking for. He walked over and announced: "You're gonna be in my next play." "Who are you? replied Walter Matthau. Coming from Matthau, those were brave words. Usually it's the other way round...
Math-ow) may sound familiar, but, despite 21 movies, 21 Broadway plays and 158 TV shows, it is mostly just something dimly recalled from the grey of the co-credits. But no more. Because Playwright Neil Simon knew him, ad mired his work, and wrote the role specifically for him, Matthau, 44 is now starring in Broadway's new smash comedy The Odd Couple (TIME, March 19) and he is so belly achingly funny as a loutish sportswriter that no one will ever forget him again...
...character creations has a fine-tuned completeness that leaves no room for Matthau the personality to peek through. A gimmick a trademark, an image, Matthau does not have: "People either ask me, 'Are you a television actor? or else, 'Are you from Erie, Pa.?' " Playwright Simon says Matthau is "the greatest instinctive actor I ve ever seen " He has turned in impeccable, widely varied performances as a sardonic sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a show-stopping jealous Hungarian husband in Goodbye Charlie, the heavy in Charade, and a phrase-chomping gangster...
...Mike Nichols touch, always deft, daft and droll, flicks The Odd Couple along at a dervish's pace. But it is Neil Simon's comic freshness of vision that provides the inner momentum. Simon rarely tosses a line straight up in the air for an isolated gag; he hits it across a net of personal relationships so that a steady volley of wit builds up out of character and situation. Simon also knows how to prod a cliché off its bed of banality so that it walks toward the brink of logical absurdity. "Who'd send...