The Unlikeliest Star

But it’s also because Matthau is an actor so in control of his craft that he can make the smallest gesture speak volumes. In the 1978 House Calls, Matthau plays a recently widowed surgeon who barges into Glenda Jackson’s apartment because he needs to use her phone to call the auto club. He barely knows her, but while he’s waiting, he takes off his shoes so he can be comfortable — a pitch-perfect piece of business that captures both the overwhelming arrogance and the endearing informality of his character.

There’s a comparable moment in Hanging Up, Matthau’s latest film. He plays Lou, the semi-demented, drunken father of Eve (Meg Ryan). She comes to visit him in the hospital, and Lou begins to speak endearments that quickly grow uncomfortably lascivious. Eve realizes her father thinks she’s another woman and is making a pass at her. Enacting this Freudian fantasy is beyond Meg Ryan’s gifts as an actress — her pretty face simply becomes a disapproving mask — but not Matthau’s. His voice drops to a wooing near-whisper, and you realize Lou’s not flirting so much as he is pleading.

Most old actors playing old men get a sickeningly sweet twinkle in their eyes, and Matthau can certainly do cute, as he did playing Albert Einstein in the misbegotten comedy I.Q. (also co-starring Ryan). But he doesn’t do cute in Hanging Up, an otherwise meretricious piece of work that can use every ounce of honesty Matthau can squeeze out of it. His character is a monster, and Matthau doesn’t shrink from it: There’s a chilling scene later in the film when he stares at Ryan with hatred and tells her that, when she was born, her mother took one look at her and said, “Throw that one back.” But even as he’s raging, Matthau reveals the weakness that has allowed his character to give his monstrousness full vent.

This is Matthau’s first supporting role in decades — since 1966, in fact, when he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his hilarious ambulance-chasing lawyer in The Fortune Cookie. From his early appearance on screen, as a whip-wielding Westerner in 1955’s The Kentuckian, he had been solely a character actor — a villain, for the most part, whose specialty was exuding intellectual arrogance and heartlessness in films like Fail-Safe and Charade.

One of the reasons it’s hard for actors to stop playing villains is that villains are, by definition, characters with whom viewers don’t identify — you’re supposed to hate them, you have no interest in understanding them, and any actor who makes a villain memorable seems far more capable of alienating an audience’s affections than of winning it. Matthau would probably never have risen above his villain status had he not journeyed to Broadway in 1964 to play Oscar Madison in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Matthau was allowed to recreate his stage role when The Odd Couple was made into a movie in 1968 because he had won an Oscar the year before and because the movie’s putative star was not he, but the moneymaking Jack Lemmon.

Lemmon or no Lemmon, The Odd Couple belonged to Matthau. As Oscar, a divorced slob of a New York sports-writer driven to distraction when his fussy friend Felix moves in, Matthau was not only effortlessly funny but authentic in a way Hollywood performers rarely are. When Simon sent him the script, Matthau said he wanted to play Felix because Oscar would be too easy. “Walter, do me a favor,” Simon replied. “Act on your own time.”

It’s not surprising that Matthau felt himself similar to Oscar — most men feel like Oscar at some point. Shambling around Manhattan, trying hard not to make eye contact with anyone in a restaurant as the adenoidal Felix tries to clear his stopped-up ears by making moose noises, and impatiently barking “No, there’s no Dabby here” into the phone when his five-year-old son calls him during a poker game. Matthau is the divorced guy everybody knows — an uncle, a friend, a neighbor — whose life as a solitary man is causing him to revert to the state of nature.

With The Odd Couple, Matthau began a second career as a leading man, and he has chosen his parts interestingly and well. He played a brilliant thief in the underrated Charley Varrick from 1973, before going on to play seen-it-all cops in two equally underrated 1970s films, The Laughing Policeman and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.

A compulsive gambler who says he has lost $ 50 million as a bettor, Matthau has a particular affinity for movies set at the track. He was a low-rent Cajun horse-trainer who finds himself the owner of a champion in a lovely film called Casey’s Shadow. And as the bookie Sorrowful Jones in the 1980 version of Damon Runyon’s oft-filmed Little Miss Marker, he proved himself the only actor in Hollywood history able to make Runyon’s wonderfully stilted dialogue sound even remotely realistic. “Milk is considered tops for sleeping,” the unsmiling Sorrowful says to a distraught six-year-old who is lying awake in his apartment after being left by her father as collateral for a bet. As Matthau speaks, almost throwing the words away, we realize the little girl’s presence is defrosting Sorrowful’s heart.

Matthau’s specialty is playing men in their seventies, which he began doing at age fifty-three in an unsatisfying little movie called Kotch (directed, poorly, by Jack Lemmon). The title character is a logorrheic retiree living with his son and unhappy daughter-in-law, a man both good-natured and unbearable — energetic but manipulative, incapable of allowing a moment to pass in silence and incapable of listening. Kotch is an interesting character in an extremely dull movie, and though Matthau is trying hard, he doesn’t quite make you forget that he’s trying to seem twenty years older than he is.

But Matthau did succeed in transcending his age four years later in his second old-man role — the decrepit exvaudevillian Willy Clark in The Sunshine Boys, the third of his six Neil Simon movies. “He writes the way I talk,” Matthau has said of his association with Simon, but it’s closer to the truth to say that only Matthau makes Simon’s tinny, punchline-a-minute dialogue sound as though it might actually come out of the mouth of a human being.

The Sunshine Boys is a document of real interest twenty-five years after its release. With the passing away of almost every native Yiddish speaker, Matthau’s eerily accurate Yiddish-American accent is a powerful reminder of something that has been lost. At the time of the film’s release, Matthau was over-shadowed by George Burns, who resuscitated his own career with an Oscar-winning turn as Willy Clark’s detested former partner. And Matthau’s performance came in for some severe criticism, particularly from Pauline Kael, who complained that he shouted too much. But The Sunshine Boys is in fact the supreme achievement of Matthau’s career — and his performance is one of the cinema’s comic high-water marks.

The Sunshine Boys is a movie that could never be made today, because it does nothing but make fun of the elderly. It’s a comedy about the loss of memory, the onrush of senility, and the obstinate refusal of the aged to admit to their infirmities. Matthau spends most of the movie with an expression of befuddlement as he forgets what he just said, what somebody else just said, why he’s even standing where he’s standing.

Forty years after his heyday in vaudeville, Willie Clark is still trying to make a living in show business. He goes on auditions for TV commercials, even though he can’t remember the product — as he speaks, a brand of potato chip called Frumpies degenerates into Clumpies, or Frinkies, or Mumpies. When a director tries to correct him, Willie gets huffy: “I been in this business fifty-seven years,” he says, and promptly gets it wrong again. He asks his long-suffering agent, who is also his long-suffering nephew, why he didn’t get an audition for a new Broadway musical. When told it’s an all-black show, Willie says angrily, “I did black in 1922, and when I did black, you could understand the words.”

Mostly he spends his days in pajamas, watching soap operas, pining for the days when he was a headliner — part of the legendary team of Lewis and Clark. But when he’s offered a chance to resurrect their most famous sketch for a television show, he says he won’t do it because he hates his former partner so much. “As an actor no one could touch him,” Willie says. “As a human being no one wanted to touch him.”

Perhaps it’s because Matthau gained such experience from playing old men at a younger age that he doesn’t fall into any of the standard cliches now that he is as old as the characters he plays. In Grumpy Old Men, a 1993 box-office triumph that reminded Hollywood there is an audience for films beyond age twenty-five, Matthau and Lemmon play small-town neighbors who have been trapped in a feud most of their lives. At one point they pummel each other on a frozen pond, only to be separated by Lemmon’s eighty-nine-year-old father, played by the late Burgess Meredith. “Damn kids!” Meredith snarls. Matthau freezes. “Mr. Gustafson!” he says, momentarily turning, right before our eyes, back into a nine-year-old boy being scolded by the grown-up next door.

Matthau spent eight months in the hospital last year, suffering through five bouts of pneumonia after he finished filming Hanging Up. It’s difficult for an actor to get good roles after such an illness, because the insurance companies that protect Hollywood against a calamity like an actor’s incapacitation might declare him uninsurable and effectively force him into retirement. But even if Matthau never appears on film again, he has created a body of work as a comic actor more variegated than any other American. One rarely hears Matthau’s name brought up when the greats of cinema are mentioned. One should.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.