Review of The Odd Couple (1968) by Edith N — 03 Oct 2012

Funny Right Before It Lurches to a Halt, Over and Over Again.

Really, I couldn't live with either of them. I don't think most people could. Most people, after all, fall somewhere between the two extremes, wanting sanitation but not obsession. What's more, I don't think either of them could live with me. They only manage to live together in the original long enough to give us whimsical conflict--105 minutes, to be precise. (It seems padded.) Yes, there was a TV show and then a sequel, and I don't feel a particular need for either. After all, isn't the point that some people just shouldn't live together? But no, our need for comfort and familiarity in our media means that we can't let things lie, and we feel a need to revisit and prolong them, even though, naturally, you couldn't get the stars of the movie to reprise their roles for TV, so they got replaced with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, both fine in their ways but not quite the same thing.

Oscar Madison, a divorced and slovenly sportswriter, is hosting the weekly poker game in his pit of an apartment when he gets a phone call. Felix Unger (Jack Lemmon), one of his poker buddies, has been kicked out by his wife and sent her a suicide telegram. He doesn't do it, but Oscar and the others are worried enough so that Oscar invites Felix to move in for a while. Felix is . . . not slovenly. He's neat about to the point that Adrian Monk would tell him to lighten up a bit. This goes about as well as you can expect. Oh, on the one hand, Felix does manage to help Oscar save enough money so that he actually catches up with his alimony. On the other hand, he washes the playing cards. Oscar manages to set up a date with two British women living upstairs, Cecily (Monica Evans) and Gwendolyn (Carole Shelley), the "cuckoo Pigeon sisters." One is widowed and the other divorced, and they seem to be a good chance for the guys to get out for a good time, but of course things do not go the way Oscar wants, and it's Felix's fault.

Honestly, I don't much like Neil Simon. Gwen says that this play has been the salvation of many a community theatre company; people go see [i]The Odd Couple[/i]. I can see why; I did actually laugh out loud several times. On the other hand, there were plenty of scenes which seemed to drag. The Pigeon sisters' giggling was irritating to the extent that I couldn't understand why anyone would want to spend a meal with them, much less a night. The scene where the guys are trying to be subtle and nonchalant and failing miserably was funny, but the scene where they're trying to keep Felix from killing himself was a bit long. On and on like that. I'd just be really warming up to the movie, which I was mostly watching because it's mentioned on a dozen or more [i]MST3K[/i] episodes, and something would happen to just really bother or bore me. I wanted to find a middle ground, and there just isn't one to be had in this movie.

Oh, I can see why this occupies the place it does in pop culture. After all, it was coming at a time when people were first becoming willing to admit that not all marriages were happily-ever-after. A whole crop of men were having to learn how to live without their wives, when they'd never expected to have to do certain things ever again. Again, from the way both men describe their marriages, it's hard to picture sticking with them as long as their wives are supposed to have done. I suspect it's at least in part because their wives believed that you were supposed to stay with your husband no matter what, and they hadn't really known what they were getting into. So, you know, this is a generation's realization that life isn't always the way they expected, and that's significant even when it isn't very good. I get that. And it is, as I said, funny in places. So there's all of that. Even if I don't feel even a little interest in watching this a second time.

There's always a risk when you get a roommate, even when it's someone you've known and loved for years. I've lived with two of my best friends, and both times, it's gone pretty well. But I've lived with other friends where it hasn't. A lot of the time, roommate situations end with people no longer on speaking terms. People have different interests. People have different requirements for how clean things are--it's been the biggest stumbling block in my current living situation. With my other best friend, it was that we both had just too much stuff for the apartment we were in. Neither of these have proved irreparable to the friendships, and I'm grateful, but I'm starting to think this whole thing is something that people haven't necessarily known for very long. It's relatively recently that people have started living with friends for extended periods of time, and maybe that's another thing the movie is teaching us. Loving someone isn't enough to make living with them bearable.