Day 7: We're All Out Of Cornflakes. F.U.

THE ODD COUPLE (1967)
Directed by Gene Saks
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Monica Evans, Carole Shelley

Based on the 1965 Tony Award-winning play by Neil Simon, we have the story of Felix Unger (Lemmon) and Oscar Madison (Matthau).  Felix's wife has kicked him out of the house and is seeking divorce.  Oscar, along with his poker buddies, all fear for Felix's sanity, so the slovenly Oscar decides to take him in, despite Felix's assertion that he is a very difficult person to live with.  Of course, how bad can it be?  Well, when your friend-in-need-turned-roomate is a compulsive clean freak, trying to make his situation resemble his former marriage as much as possible, pretty bad.  Felix constantly gets on Oscar's last nerve, even ruining a planned night of romance with two British sisters (Evans and Shelley).  Finally, Oscar can take no more and orders his suicidal friend to leave.  Felix complies, but with a stern warning that whatever happens is on Oscar's head.  As it turns out, everything is alright, as the British sisters love the sensitive and sweet Felix and take him in.

It's always a risk trying to convert a play into a film, as what works on the stage doesn't always work on the screen.  Even the acting is a different kind of animal.  On stage, the actor must constantly stay in character for two hours a night.  Shooting a movie takes weeks of shortened takes, shot out of sequence, so an actor may be jovial one day and weeping the next.  But when you get actors who are familiar with material that is already golden, you generally don't have many issues.  And that's the case with The Odd Couple.

There are two ways to go about doing a comedy.  You can either go the sketch route, with gag-driven scenarios that get plenty of laughs, but don't really endear us to the characters.  It's perfectly valid, but it's not what's called for here.  No, here we have a more observational humor that is character-driven; the gags all center around Felix and Oscar's eccentricities.  They play off each others differences in a hilarious way.  And works as well as it does because Felix and Oscar are believable as people.  As such, we can identify with them.  And because of that, we can laugh at them, especially since we all know people like them.  Maybe we even are them.

Of course, the other problem with turning a play into a film is the tendency to shoot the film like a play.  The Odd Couple falls into that trap at times, focusing a majority of the action in Oscar's apartment.  However, the action is taken outside to the streets of New York from time to time, and even to Shea Stadium.  But everything important happens at Oscar's apartment, only because it doesn't have to happen anywhere else.  Besides, the problem of having your polar opposite as your roommate is the entire crux of the film.  So who needs to go outside?

The Odd Couple actually holds up surprisingly well - better than a lot of films from the sixties.  I don't think that was the intention, but when making movies, it's a good thing to bear in mind that people may very well be watching it forty or fifty years from now.  Now the T.V. show based on this film?  That's another story...