Codgers, Shticky and Sticky

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Old guys. They fill their long, fixed-income days and their TV-dinner nights wistfully recalling past potencies. If we are to believe two new movies, they also spend a fair amount of time plotting new conquests -- and not necessarily of age-appropriate ladies either. The rest of their long hours they pass bickering.

Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are awfully good at this sort of thing. You might say they've been practicing since they were (relatively speaking) kids. By this time they instinctively know how to bring out the comic best in each other -- Matthau's bullying misanthropy, Lemmon's melancholic good cheer. It follows that they invest Grumpy Old Men, in which they play querulous neighbors, with an appeal that is nostalgic and, if you are a devotee of well- practiced shtick, technically seamless.

Maybe it's the fact that the pair are working in the frozen north -- the film is set in a small Minnesota town -- that ensures that the comedy is fairly crisp. Or maybe it's that the script by Mark Steven Johnson and the direction by Donald Petrie (both young shavers) keep sentiment within reasonable bonds. Or maybe, God love them, it's that the filmmakers allow one of their leads to be something more than a dreamer, sexually speaking. It helps too that the object of his successful affections is Ann-Margret, all peaches and cream, playing a free-spirited new neighbor. In a movie about old age, the gambit is virtually unprecedented.

By contrast, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway takes place in hot, muggy Miami. The old gentlemen here are Richard Harris as Frank, a sometime seafarer who once brawled with Papa, and Robert Duvall as Walt, a fastidious Cuban barber, now retired. Harris has fun overacting, Duvall has fun underacting, but nobody has any fun with the opposite sex. Frank has a snappish relationship with his landlady, played by Shirley MacLaine, and is too raffish for Piper Laurie, who is excellent as a dignified lady he meets at senior-citizen matinees. Meanwhile Walt moons over a young waitress (Sandra Bullock). Also written by a sprout, Steve Conrad, and directed by Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God, The Doctor), who specializes in the woes of isolation, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway aspires to be serious about its subject. Yet in a curious way this sobriety works against it. Frank and Walt turn into schematically contrasting case studies, and the movie's sympathy for them eventually becomes patronizing.

Grumpy Old Men avoids both queasiness and boredom by throwing only sharp, sidelong glances at old-age issues like straitened circumstances and the death of friends. And the fact that Matthau and Lemmon are playing men of their own ages (73 and 68), which Harris and Duvall (61 and 63) are not, adds authenticity and an element of gallantry to the movie. It also suggests a solution to the problem of old age: if you're healthy, keep working.