Starting this Friday evening, Turner Classic Movies is running a Neil Simon film fest. The nice round number of 17 movies written by Mr. Simon will be screened and our pal Ken Levine will intro and outro as host. Here's the list.
They're starting strong this Friday with The Odd Couple, which is one of those films I've seen about eight hundred quadrillion times. Yeah, it's talky. Yeah, it's pretty much a photographed stage play without much about it that's cinematic. Yeah, the ending's a bit limp. I don't care. I think it's hilarious.
Walter Matthau plays the role he originated on Broadway. Jack Lemmon plays the role Art Carney originated on Broadway. I would have loved to have seen Carney do it. I did see him live in another of Mr. Simon's plays — The Prisoner of Second Avenue — and he was wonderful…but Lemmon is pretty danged wonderful as Felix, too. (One of the few times I didn't like Jack Lemmon on the screen was the film version of The Prisoner of Second Avenue but I think that was the adaptation, not him. It's also far from my favorite of Simon's plays.)
Interestingly, even though Matthau had won an Academy Award for his prior teaming with Lemmon — The Fortune Cookie — Lemmon got more than three times the salary for The Odd Couple. I suspect that after this one, Matthau achieved parity. At one point, there were negotiations with Billy Wilder, who'd directed The Fortune Cookie and many of Lemmon's other best films, about directing The Odd Couple. I'm kinda glad he didn't as I can't imagine Wilder being as true to the stage play…or any better.
Over on Wikipedia, where as we all know erroneous information is rare, it says…
At one point, Frank Sinatra (as Felix) and Jackie Gleason (as Oscar) were going to do the movie version but this fell through. Dick Van Dyke and Tony Randall were among those considered for the role of Felix (the latter portrayed him in the TV series). Similarly Jack Klugman (who aside from the TV show often replaced Matthau on Broadway) and Mickey Rooney were also to play Oscar.
I don't believe any of that…or reports I've seen that Gleason was going to play Oscar to Art Carney's Felix. I believe the Mickey Rooney rumor came from a story Garry Marshall tells about casting the TV version. He says they hired Randall and asked him if he had anyone to suggest as his Oscar. Randall mentioned Rooney. Marshall, who'd worked with Mickey Rooney, said, "Write down your second choice on a piece of paper and I promise I'll get that person instead."
There are many interesting trivial things to watch for in The Odd Couple. One is the scene at Shea Stadium where the players staged a triple-play for the cameras. It was shot there on June 27, 1967 just before a Mets-Pirate game with Bill Mazeroski as the batter who hits into the one-two-three sequence. It is said that Roberto Clemente of the Pirates was originally going to do it but, depending on which report you believe, he either tried to do it but couldn't or declined to be in the scene at all.
Maury Wills was reportedly one of the baserunners. This was during the brief period when the Dodgers traded him to Pittsburgh, which traded him to Montreal, which traded him back to the Dodgers. That guy got around and not just on the field.
Here's another minor thing to watch for. At one point, Felix (Lemmon) goes to a Bohack. That's a now-defunct supermarket chain in the East which was still somewhat funct back in '68 when the film was made. Felix pesters a butcher for fresh ground beef…and the butcher was played by Joe Palma, who gained fame as Fake Shemp.
When Shemp Howard died, the Three Stooges had four shorts yet to make on their then-current contract….shorts that had been planned with real low budgets thanks to extensive reuse of old footage. If the producers had replaced Shemp with another actor not playing Shemp, they wouldn't have been able to use all that existing film. So they replaced him with bit player Joe Palma as Shemp, keeping his face away from the camera. Palma later became Jack Lemmon's personal assistant and had small roles in most of his movies…like this one. (In Good Neighbor Sam, he played a character named Mr. Palma.)
Finally, just to see how deep this blog can delve into utter, meaningless matters, I'm going to share with you a mystery that I think about every time I see this movie. At the beginning, Jack Lemmon is roaming the streets of New York, contemplating suicide. At one point, he goes to the old Metropole Cafe at at 7th Avenue and 48th Street. It started life as a great jazz club, turned into a strip bar at some point and closed some time in the seventies, I believe. On his way in, he passes a lady coming out — a woman with way too much eye makeup on. You can sort of make her out in the image below. She's the one with the orange-yellow coat…
Once Lemmon is inside, he ogles a line of dancers dancing above the bar. One of them is pretty clearly the same lady. Here's a better photo of her from that sequence…
This is flagged in many books and websites that list mistakes in movies. They note that a dancer is seen leaving the club and then the same lady is dancing inside the club. Okay. But here's what puzzles me…
The exterior shots of the Metropole were shot on location on 7th Avenue in New York. The interior shots of the Metropole were shot in Hollywood on a soundstage at the Paramount lot. (One of the other dancers is Angelique Pettijohn, who turned up in bit roles in everything Paramount was shooting on that lot at the time, including the original Star Trek.)
How is the actress with the industrial strength mascara in both scenes? She's essentially an extra and they wouldn't fly an extra cross-country, especially to be in a shot that she shouldn't have been in at all.
The only thing I can imagine is that she was the spouse or lady friend of someone who worked on the crew in both locations and she tagged along with him. That's quite a reach and maybe the answer is that they're not the same lady…they just happened to engage two women in different cities who looked amazingly alike. But it sure looks like the same woman.
Anyway, don't let that riddle distract you from enjoying The Odd Couple. Great film.
It's kind of amazing how many movies written by Neil Simon T.C.M, is not showing in this festival: Barefoot in the Park, The Last of the Red-Hot Lovers, I Ought To Be In Pictures, Max Dugan Returns, The Lonely Guy, The Slugger's Wife, Brighton Beach Memoirs, The Marrying Man and The Odd Couple II. Most of those aren't wonderful — Barefoot in the Park is the best of 'em — but, geez, the man's lifetime output just as a screenwriter is incredible. Never mind all the TV shows and the 37 (!) produced plays, some of which ran for years on Broadway and are still staged constantly in revivals and non-Broadway productions.
And enjoy Ken's commentaries at the start and close of each of the seventeen films they are running. I think I have most of the movies on DVD but I'm TiVoing them all just to hear what he has to say. I wonder if, being a sportscaster at heart, he'll mention that triple-play.