There are many things I loved about Walter Matthau as an actor. But one of the things I loved most was how damned ordinary he could look.
It was his ace in the hole. In a town filled with too many male swans and peacocks, Matthau was a proud and unregenerate crow. He was a super-crow: secure in his homeliness, confident in his earthy antiglamor, mostly unconcerned with fine feathers–and capable of stealing the screen (and the entire movie) from any peacock, any time.
Of course, in movies, “ordinary” is always relative. Matthau, who died last weekend at 79, was not someone who could ever have faded into the woodwork. He was, after all, a movie star to the end, an Oscar-winner, a guy who never stopped working–which means audiences never got tired of looking at him.
In person, he could be quite imposing: He was a rangy, 6-foot-3-inch ex-star high school athlete who won six battle stars as an Army Air Corps radioman/gunner in World War II and who had acted from the age of 12. He had charisma to spare.
What he didn’t have was conventional movie star good looks and demeanor. Instead of a Greek profile, Matthau had a walrus puss with a battered nose and a semi-permanent smirk. Instead of a hard-body physique, he had a herky-jerky, slope-shouldered slouching posture that suggested that his entire body was somehow moving in separate sections. Instead of a mellifluous, seductive baritone, he had a buzz-saw growl, alternately dour and whiny, that at times suggested a classic sarcastic New York City cop or cabbie and at others suggested Bullwinkle the Moose after three martinis.
Matthau was no Tom Cruise. But then he didn’t want to be. And I’ll lay you 10 to 1 that, on his good days, Cruise would love to be a Walter Matthau. (Unfortunately, Matthau himself might have taken that bet. Gambling was his major vice, one that he once estimated lost him over five million dollars.)
What Matthau was, instead, was this: a quintessential New York City guy with talents and smarts who could believably blend into almost any landscape. Compare him with Jack Lemmon, his best friend and the other half of what may have been the best comedy team ever in American sound movies. They were great because they’re so different, so complementary. Where Lemmon looks and sounds like Boston prep school money, Matthau looked “ethnic.” He was the son of impoverished Russian-Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side and his real name, often misspelled, was Walter Matuschanskayasky.
He also looked like someone who had been around and who knew the score–which he had and did.
So, like Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy, Matthau made his lack of standard movie handsomeness into a virtue; when he came on screen, whether as cop, cardsharp or judge, you could always believe him. One story he loved to tell involved an irate audience member who came up to him after a stage performance of “Three Men and a Horse,” complaining that, while everybody else looked like a real actor, Matthau had looked “just like a poolroom bum!” (She ignored, somehow, the fact that he was playing a poolroom bum.)
As an actor, he could do many things extremely well, stretching from bums to crooked lawyers, tough cops to effete snobs, bank robbers to U.S. presidential advisors, cranky vaudevillians to Albert Einstein. When Neil Simon handed him “The Odd Couple” and asked him to read the role of slob sportswriter Oscar Madison–the part Simon wrote for him and that, Matthau later admitted, was so fine a match for his personality and talent that it made him a star–he asked instead to play Felix Unger, obsessively fastidious photographer and Oscar’s emotional opposite. And he kept on asking to play Felix, suggesting well into the run that he and the stage Felix (Art Carney) should switch parts for a while.
The joke is that Matthau probably could have played Felix and been great. But he was the perfect Oscar. When you watch him in the 1968 movie of “The Odd Couple”–which is directed only adequately and visually drab–there is still absolute magic in the way Matthau crawls into his character, suggesting that he is both the city’s best sportswriter and its sloppiest housekeeper. And there’s also magic in the way he reacts to Felix’s nonstop neuroses or hurls Felix’s linguini on the wall (Felix: “It’s not spaghetti, it’s linguini!” Oscar: “Now it’s garbage.”) or hands out “brown and green sandwiches” at the poker table, explaining that the green sandwiches are either “very new cheese or very old meat.” Neil Simon wrote those lines, of course, and “The Odd Couple” remains the funniest he has written, but nobody could say them like Matthau–and give you a believable, enjoyable, flawed and sympathetic human being in the bargain.
He was a man of many faces, all of them skeptical. He was also a master of biting, realistic comedy–and an absolute master of both the slow burn and the lightning put-down. A Matthau-delivered crack was like a perfectly aimed howitzer blast, exploding all pretension. His ability to deflate the pompous or phony with a few well-chosen growls was uncanny.
That’s why he was so great with the super-sensitive, sentimental Lemmon or in movies written by that king of sarcasm Billy Wilder. When Matthau fixed a co-star (preferably Lemmon) with that basilisk stare and let loose, there was no defense. (In real life as well. Once, at a screening of Lemmon’s 1976 flop “Alex and the Gypsy,” when Lemmon asked what he thought, his chum snarled back: “Get out of it.”)
Walter Matthau was one of the great wisecrackers in the history of movies. But he was more: an ordinary-looking guy who could capture the essence of ordinary–and extraordinary humanity– and make us laugh at things that sometimes should have made us cry. That’s’ why he didn’t need Tom Cruise’s looks, Harrison Ford’s stare, Brad Pitt’s smile or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s torso. He had something better: the ability to make us laugh, make us feel and cringe, make us believe. And that’s why Walter Matthau, smirking and slouching and snarling from the Lower East Side to Beverly Hills, will always be in the pantheon of moviedom. I’ll lay you 6 to 1.
MATTHAU’S GOLDEN DOZEN
Walter Matthau was one of those rare movie actors who always was good, even in movies that were falling apart around him. But he’s especially good in the following 12:
“The Fortune Cookie” (1966): As “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich, the conniving lawyer who talks his once honest brother in-law Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) into insurance fraud.
“The Odd Couple” (1968): As sloppy sportswriter Oscar Madison, temporary roomie of neat freak Felix Unger (Lemmon).
“A New Leaf” (1971): As Henry Graham, bankrupt ex-millionaire, desperately wooing clumsy heiress Henrietta Lowell (writer-director Elaine May).
“Plaza Suite” (1971): In three roles at New York’s Plaza Hotel, for favorite playwright Neil Simon.
“Charley Varrick” (1973): As crop dusting pilot/bank robber Varrick, self-billed “last of the independents,” who runs afoul of the Mafia.
“The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (1974): As NYPD Lt. Garber, battling terrorists on the subway.
“The Front Page” (1974): As ruthless Chicago Examiner editor Walter Burns, whose star reporter, Hildy Johnson (Lemmon), wants to quit.
“The Sunshine Boys” (1975): As cranky elderly comedian Willy Clark, forced to reunite for a TV special with exasperating partner Al Lewis (George Burns).
“The Bad News Bears” (1976): As foul-mouthed baseball coach Morris Buttermaker, who takes a ragtag Little League team to glory.
“Pirates” (1988): As Roman Polanski’s luckless buccaneer Capt. Thomas Bartholomew Red.
“Grumpy Old Men” (1993): As Max Goldman, cantankerous neighbor of lifelong rival John Gustafson (Lemmon).
“I’m Not Rappaport” (1996): As an octogenarian of many names (Bartley, Hernando, “Tony the Cane” Donatto, etc.), who likes to rap in Central Park with fellow oldster Midge (Ossie Davis).
