Cinema: The O.D. Couple

BUDDY BUDDY

Directed by Billy Wilder Screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

They just look funny. Jack Lemmon: personification of the Excedrin headache, his sinus cavities almost visible, the corners of his mouth wrenched in a clown’s grimace as the voice machine-guns a blast of staccato croaks. Walter Matthau: the epitome of slob insouciance, a flophouse face and shaggy-dog body, wearing clothes like rumpled bed sheets, maneuvering across a room like a hunchback tiptoeing on roller skates. To see either one is to smile; to see them together, in The Fortune Cookie or The Odd Couple or here, working variations on the Mutt-and-Jeff theme, is to appreciate the musical symbiosis of a splendid comedy team.

This time Matthau is a career assassin, eradicating Mob stool pigeons with the weary professionalism of a top C.P.A., and Lemmon, a network censor and a jilted husband poised to end his misery in suicide. They meet on their mutual missions, in a hotel room. For Matthau it is loathe at first sight; for Lemmon it is a last grab at camaraderie before lights out. See how they run on the treadmill of French farce, tripping over each other’s discomfort, overdosing on the crudest twists of plot.

Billy Wilder, 75, who has been writing mordantly funny movies for more than a half-century and directing them for almost as long, has slowed though not mellowed with age. Gone is the crackling pace of Some Like It Hot and One Two Three; now the actors pause after a punch line for laughs that may never come. The pirouetting narrative (from Francis Veber’s script for the French film A Pain in the A—) is occasionally incredible. Wasted in flaccid supporting roles are the comic gifts of Paula Prentiss and the decadent-skeleton face of Klaus Kinski. Some of the jokes and targets have lost their currency (“Prema ture ejaculation means always having to say you’re sorry”? Hippies? Slow-witted chicanos?). But if Wilder’s antique vehicle is no more than serviceable, it is ever at the service of two meticulous farceurs, and Lemmon and Matthau are never less than funny funny.

— By Richard Corliss