Picturenose

Damn hot!

A critic knows a masterpiece when it drives him or her to distraction in shoveling out a new angle with each new appraisal. With an auteur like Billy Wilder at the helm, one’s pencil is going to be bitten and licked to the quick.

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Bad day at the office?

Thank your luckies you’re not CC Baxter, Jack Lemmon’s resentfully downtrodden clerk in an NYC corporation, who has become so cowed by the predations of his boss and the insecurity of his position he allows his superiors use of his flat to have it off with their mistresses. He’s 9 to 5 – they’re cinq-a-sept. Baxter’s immediate overlord, Sheldrake, is a nauseatingly complacent rat played to oleaginous perfection by Fred MacMurray whose attempts to ingratiate himself with Lemmon’s character amount to no more than using the insulting and hated nickname ‘Buddy Boy’ to a man he is doubly exploiting.

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Comedy coup

Is Neal Hefti’s misleadingly jaunty theme tune for The Odd Couple derived from Klezmer? It should be, because writer Neil Simon’s stratospheric comedy of bad manners is possibly one of the most New York-Jewish films ever made. True, there are no references to nebbechim or kasha or bubelehim or goyim or jokes about protective mums and rabbis from Chelm, but one always feels they are about to break out, and the central characters’ endless bickering grows out of Talmudic logic and the letter of moral contracts. That and the fact that the credits read like a Tel Aviv phone book.

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