The Odd Couple

Waddling around on feet that by all rights ought to be webbed, Oscar Madison is the slop-happiest hero in history. In midsummer, Christmas stockings still hang over his hearth, and his refrigerator is cleaned so seldom that he has milk standing up in there without the bottle. And yet, as played by Walter Matthau, he is the better half of The Odd Couple.

The Neil Simon comedy that lit up Broadway for more than two years shines again in this flawed but still funny screen adaptation. Heading for divorce, Felix Ungar (Jack Lemmon) is a casualty of the war between the sexes. The same calamity befell his old pal Oscar, an alimony-poor sportswriter with a rambling eight-room flat on Manhattan's Riverside Drive. Out of pity and penury, he invites Felix to share his lair. At this point Simon pulls the switch that brightens the screen: the partnership becomes a parody of a failing marriage. Oscar is the kind of host who offers his card-playing buddies green sandwiches that were "either very new cheese or very old meat." Felix is Mr. Clean, an uptight neurotic ("the only man in the world with clenched hair") who does all the shopping and cooking and charges the cigar-smoky atmosphere with deodorizer until his roommate mumbles: "Leave everything alone. I'm not through dirtying up for the night."

Can this marriage be saved? Felix tries, by allowing his partner to invite a couple of British birds for dinner. While Oscar plays the randy dandy, Felix hilariously glums up the works by showing pictures of his ex-wife and kids to the girls until they dissolve into enough tears to drown the evening. After a series of megatonic comic explosions, the men learn enough about themselves to try a second go with their former lives.

The Odd Couple is not quite the near-perfect comedy it could have been. Except for a handful of outdoor shots, Director Gene Saks has followed the original Mike Nichols staging with slavish and unimaginative fidelity. Time after time, the camera remains static while the dialogue is left to fend for itself. Although he is one of Hollywood's most polished performers, Lemmon too often strains to achieve the lines of tension that characterized Art Carney's high-strung stage interpretation of the role.

The film owes its comic force to two stars--one visible, the other unseen. Walter Matthau, with his loping, sloping style, mangled grin and laugh-perfect timing, may well be America's finest comic actor. And Playwright Neil Simon occasionally takes off his clowns' masks to show the humans beneath. In doing so, he has made his Odd Couple real people, with enough substance to cast shadows alongside the jokes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.