Walter Matthau

  • The Odd Couple (1968)

    The Odd Couple (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018) The premise of The Odd Couple is universal to the point of nearly being a cliché fifty years later: A neat freak and a slob having to cope with each other in a single apartment? Sure-fire laughs. After seeing the same variation a few dozen times, however, it’s not surprising that the original The Odd Couple would feel so familiar. The film seemingly takes forever to establish what seems already obvious, and some plot points (especially during the third act) now feel forced more than organic. Fortunately, other elements rescue the film from those weaker moments: Both Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are quite good in the lead roles, and the beauty of The Odd Couple’s classic structure means that the film is almost bound to be satisfying from the beginning to the end. But the film’s biggest asset remains Neil Simon’s terrific dialogue, as witty now at it was then and adding much to the now-standard formula. The result may not feel particularly fresh, but it continues to get laughs.

  • The Bad News Bears (1976)

    The Bad News Bears (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2017) Either they don’t make kids movies like they did, or The Bad News Bears was an oddity even in its time. As we meet our protagonist day-drinking in the parking lot of a neighborhood baseball field, it’s obvious early on that this film goes for hard-luck gritty life lessons. Fortunately, it works even as it’s horrifying by 2017 standards: Seeing kids tag along an adult drinking beer while driving a convertible is the kind of thing that register as a very different kind of funny these days. Walter Matthau is pretty good as the initially reprehensible protagonist—a washed-up failure who learns lessons from coaching a team of early-teen misfits who shouldn’t even be playing in their league. Good character work (especially by Tatum O’Neal as a tomboy with a history and Jackie Earle Haley as a teenage hoodlum) helps a lot, and The Bad News Bears’ fondness for its oddball characters remains endearing even today. The various slurs aren’t so much fun, but given that the film is forty years old at this point, it’s not entirely unexpected. The ending remains a case study in how to transform defeat into a moral triumph. The score is also noteworthy, taking bits and pieces of opera Carmen for inspiration. There’s also an interesting, very American atmosphere to this bicentennial film—the emphasis on baseball helps ground it into a depiction of suburbia circa 1976.