Word: wildernesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FORTUNE COOKIE. Director Billy Wilder's latest slap at American mores involves a money-grubbing angler (Walter Matthau) who uses his brother-in-law (Jack Lemmon) as bait to hook a large insurance company and cheat it out of a tax-free...
...This, Wilder's 20th movie, both climaxes and redeems a career that has produced such diverse films as The Lost Weekend and Some Like it Hot. It embodies all that is best in Wilder: the polish of Sabrina, the bite of Ace in the Hole, and the sentimentality of The Apartment. Plus it adds a new brick to Wilder's pile: understatement...
Because The Fortune Cookie is, (unlike just about every Wilder picture in the last fifteen years) modest, it is difficult to regard as a major work. Yet with the slick surface stripped away from Wilder, he turns from a destructive into a constructive cynic. You learn again that evil mercenary people dominate the world, and for the first time that relative goodness need not indicate a suspect I.Q. or similar character defect...
...worry. Wilder has the sense not to drown The Fortune Cookie in good will. If one or two of his and I.A.L. Diamond's screenplays have been funnier over-all, there has still been none in which as high a percentage of the jokes came off. This is largely due to the efforts of two veteran comics: Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon...
...Fortune Cookie is more than Wilder's redemption; it is a tightly written, well-acted, competently filmed, funny American movie. Most of the Boston people who see it these days are refugees from the endless line in front of Georgy Girl next door. It should be the other way around...