Posts Tagged ‘Jack Lemmon’

Jack’s no lemon

One of the best things about having a site where films are discussed is that you’re in a position to talk up your favourite movies. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) is one of those, and I know my esteemed writing partner James agrees. This is a film that deserves to be watched – not only because it really is something special, but also for the ensemble cast and firecracker dialogue.

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Damn hot!

A critic knows a masterpiece when it drives him or her to distraction in shovelling 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.

The hook for the studio here was, firstly, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, two rising young male leads, and also Marilyn Monroe to add jiggle factor and to offset the cross-dressing that, although it may be central to the plotting of this rambunctious black farce, might have resulted in it not playing too well in Peoria. Wilder, ever the master, and with his trusted sidekick I.A.L Diamond, is one jump ahead, with a screenplay to elevate an otherwise one-ply plot – two loser jazz musicians unwittingly witness the St Valentine’s Day massacre and flee in drag to Miami to escape mob retribution where they fetch up with an all-girl jazz-band, dominated by singing uke-player Sugar Kane (Monroe), where the Mafiosi are foiled and true love blooms.

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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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