Cinema: The Illegal Mind at Work

The Fortune Cookie. Director Billy Wilder has taken the very rash risk in this film of spiking his big gun. In Cookie he keeps Jack Lemmon, a funnyman-in-motion who lacks the instincts of a sit-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’s top comedians.

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 for all the marbles, kid! You got a ringing in your ears and double vision.

Your left leg is numb and you got no feeling in the first three fingers of your right hand. We’re suing for a million bucks and we’ll settle for a quarter million—tax-free!”

The hero protests that he feels just fine, but wily Willie reminds him that the big insurance firms have so much money “they run out of storage space —have to microfilm it.” And so for the next 100 minutes, the customers watch the illegal mind at work as an expert engages in a national pastime: swindling the insurance company.

Willie plays it noble. “To you gentlemen,” he announces in a sepulchral tremolo, “it’s just a question of money, but to me it’s a personal tragedy.” Willie plays it dirty. Before the insurance doctors examine his client, he needles his left leg and right arm with enough novocain to numb a mastodon. Willie plays it go, man, go. Borrowing against his hocus hopes, he picks up a fastback Mustang, a sackful of custom-tailored suits, a foxy set of fox furs for his fat-kneed wife. And when the insurance lawyers are ready to bargain, Willie makes them sit on wastebaskets and haggle like rug peddlers till in collapse they agree to pay his client $200,000.

All the 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.