The Odd Couple (1968) - film review

Felix Ungar is a New York newswriter who decides that life is no longer worth living after his wife tells him she wants a divorce.  After a bungled suicide attempt, he shows up at the apartment of his best friend, sportswriter Oscar Madison.  The latter has got over his divorce and is happily rediscovering the joys of the old bachelor life, playing poking all night and generally living like a slob.  Fearing that Felix may try to harm himself, Oscar persuades him to move into his apartment.  It is an offer that he soon regrets making.  Felix is compulsively tidy and soon transforms Oscar’s filthy pigsty into a home fit for a king.  Instead of makeshift meals that look like the end-product of a misguided biological research programme, Oscar’s stomach becomes reacquainted with real food, thanks to Felix’s unrivalled culinary talents.  But far from being grateful, Oscar is driven to the edge of sanity by his friend’s obsessive tidiness.  As much as Oscar loves Felix, he knows that, sooner or later, he will have to kill him...

Neil Simon’s award-winning play, first performed on Broadway in 1965, made an easy transition to the big screen in this hugely successful comedy featuring one of cinema’s great double acts, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.  The latter was an obvious casting choice, having played the part of the laidback slob Oscar in the original play, but his pairing with Lemmon is an inspiration and the two make what could have been a humdrum sitcom into a comedy triumph.  Simon was reputed to have based the story on his observations of Mel Brooks during a three month stay with writer Speed Vogel, following a traumatic separation from his first wife.

With humour drawn from character rather than incident, The Odd Couple is the model for the perfect sitcom, and indeed it inspired a long-running TV series of the same name, with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman playing Felix and Oscar respectively, first aired in the US from 1970 to 1975.  Neil Simon’s concept has lived through many incarnations but the one with Matthau and Lemon is undeniably the best.  The two actors had previously worked together on Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie  (1966) and had by this stage worked out an effortless comedy rapport.  Matthau is as convincing as the relaxed middle-aged slob as Lemmon is as the house-proud neurotic and the clash of these two diametrically opposed personalities is perfectly calibrated to reduce an audience to hysterics.  The film became such a cult classic that Matthau and Lemmon returned in a sequel, The Odd Couple II (1998).

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