The Odd Couple

As mentioned in yesterday's post, The Odd Couple is Neil Simon's lasting legacy. He took an absurdly simple idea--as the TV show opening stated, "Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?"--with one a slob and the other a neatnik, and made it part of the fabric of our lives. How many people have had a college roommate who was opposite them in cleaning skills and thought of themselves as Oscar and Felix?

The play debuted in 1965, with Walter Matthau as Oscar and Art Carney as Felix. When it came time to make the movie, many were considered, including Tony Randall, who ended up playing Felix on television. I was amused to read that for a while Frank Sinatra as Felix and Jackie Gleason as Oscar was a thing. Eventually, Matthau kept his role, and Jack Lemmon got the part of Felix. They had worked together before, in The Fortune Cookie, but this cemented the two of them as a team that would make many more films together.

Directed by Gene Saks, the 1968 film is the best adaptation of a Simon play (one could argue it's the best Simon film period, but I need to see The Goodbye Girl again). It remains pretty much the same as the play, although there is some opening up, and a scene in the beginning added of Felix trying to kill himself, but throwing out his back trying to open a window.

There is so much to love about this film, especially the first scene from the play, when the poker buddies try to keep Felix from killing himself, rushing from room to room like a pack of animals. The awkward moments in the scene in which the Pigeon sisters visit is also comedy gold, especially when Felix shows them a picture of his children and Cecily says, "Childhood sweethearts,were you?"

I have two favorite lines, both delivered by Matthau, who gets most of the good lines. One is when he is serving food to the poker buddies, and says "There are brown sandwiches and green sandwiches." When asked what the green sandwiches are, he says, "Either very new cheese or very old meat." My other favorite line is when Matthau, ticked off by Lemmon ruining their evening with the Pigeon sisters, demands that Lemmon remove the spaghetti from his poker table. Lemmon laughs superciliously, and tells him it's not spaghetti, it's linguine. Matthau takes the plate, hurls it against the kitchen wall, and says, "Now it's garbage." Later he will not let Lemmon clean it up. "I like it," he says.

It's notable to point out that though the TV series was based on the play and film (even re-using the Neil Hefti theme song) changes ended up being made to suit the actors, especially Randall. Lemmon played Felix as one of the guys, though he was a good cook (I love the scene in which John Fiedler and Herb Edelman compliment Lemmon on his great sandwiches). Lemmon goes bowling, shoots pool, and plays poker, whereas Randall played Felix with much more effeteness, loving the opera and not having a clue about sports, which made it difficult to understand why he and Oscar were friends to begin with. Lemmon and Matthau are believable friends, who don't realize how annoying they are until they are forced to room together.

There's a lot of anger in this story, but it has a lot of humanity, especially at the conclusion, when Lemmon is taken in by the Pigeon sisters. Though their grand experiment failed, Felix and Oscar remain friends. "I remove the curse from your head," Lemmon tells Matthau. "Thank you, oh Wicked Witch of the North," Matthau replies, a sweet smile on his face. The Odd Couple succeeds because it is not only uproariously funny, but that we care about both characters, and root them on to a solution, which Simon gives us.