Lemmon and Dennis: An Unlikely Screen Dream Team

When I think of iconic screen couples, so many come to mind. Gable and Harlow. Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Tracy and Hepburn. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (now that was chemistry!).

Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis are not among them. (Lemmon and Matthau, yes.) But maybe they should be. 

I tend to think of Lemmon chiefly as a light comedic actor in films like Bell, Book and Candle, Some Like It Hot and The Fortune Cookie. (Though, on the other hand, he did break my heart in Days of Wine and Roses.) Dennis brings to mind heavy drama, stürm and drang, with the anxious, neurotic and damaged characters she created for movies like The Fox, Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and of course, her Oscar-winning turn as that very high-strung young housewife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Jack Lemmon as George Kellerman

Sandy Dennis as Gwen Kellerman

In Neil Simon’s The Out-of-Towners (1970), both play against type to enact the misadventures of George and Gwen Kellerman, a pair of hapless and harried travelers from Twin Oaks, Ohio, on an unfortunate trip the New York City. Here, Lemmon is intense and complicated as the uptight, controlling (and occasionally explosively angry) husband, while Dennis ironically gives one of her most engaging performances as his dutiful, ‘go with the flow’ spouse who wants nothing more than to make her husband happy and support his choices. (Though she loses her cool once or twice as well!)

A New York story that depicts The Big Apple as sprawling, tough and hard-as-nails, The Out-of-Towners lampoons every negative stereotype about the city that never sleeps, and about the rigors of travel in general. (Writer Neil Simon was, of course, a lifelong New Yorker himself.)

The film’s other main character: “Is that a beautiful city?” “That is a beautiful city.”

Famous for his witty, lightning-fast dialogue that’s funny and human and honest and relatable all at the same time, Simon treads into more serious territory here than many of the comedic plays that made him famous. This is an edgier, darker story than the feather-light Come Blow Your Horn or Barefoot in the Park, or even his hilarious mismatched buddy comedy The Odd Couple.

Here, Simon crafts a hilarious and often terrifying comedy of errors, using Murphy’s law to plot an unbelievably bad trip for the Kellermans. Anything that can go wrong, does. First there’s a delay in landing the plane, then the flight is diverted to Boston due to bad weather. A crowded claustrophobic train from Boston to New York becomes a cattle car. When they arrive in the city there’s a garbage strike, a transit strike, a heavy rainstorm; the hotel did not hold their reservation. Gwen steps on a bottle and breaks the heel of her shoe; the couple is robbed at gunpoint. And so on.

Comedy is not the wheelhouse of Method actress Sandy Dennis, but as Gwen Kellerman she has impeccable instinctive timing, and many moments, mostly priceless reaction shots, that make you laugh out loud. Harvard-educated Lemmon, who won his first Oscar as the insecure but lovable Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts, depicts what is his darkest character to date in George Kellerman, a seemingly mild-mannered salesman who is triggered by circumstances into rage and utter despair. (Later, Lemmon will a second Academy Award playing an even darker character in Save the Tiger.) Interestingly, both Dennis and Jack Lemmon studied under Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen (Respect for Acting) at the HB Studio in New York and even appeared together in an Off-Broadway play years before teaming for this film.

“Two wet, insignificant out-of-town travelers.”

“Oh my God, I think I lost an eyelash.”

“George?? Can you hear me?”

“We could ask Traveler’s Aid...”

“I think I broke a tooth. Yep, there goes my smile.”

At first, it seems that the couple are mismatched to their environment—a classic fish-out-of-water theme, two Midwesterners vs. the Big City. But the travails of George and Gwen point out their mismatched personalities in the way that they deal with the vicissitudes that await them around every corner. Here, Lemmon overplays and Dennis underplays; he rages like King Lear while she assumes inscrutable blank expressions that try to hide her feelings. Their interplay is a joy to watch, though; together, they create a real chemistry and are totally believable as a married couple from Ohio.

Bringing the Kellermans’ urban nightmare to vivid life are a bevy of consummate character actors to lend support and expertly spout Simon’s acerbic dialogue at a rapid-fire pace. Most portray service people trying in vain to calm irate customers; all give unforgettable cameo performances: Ann Prentiss (sister of Paula) as a deadpan stewardess; Billy Dee Williams (Lady Sings the Blues)  from the airline Lost & Found; Johnny Brown as the smiling dining car waiter with nothing but bad news for the hungry travelers; Anthony Holland at the Waldorf Astoria front desk;  Ron Carey (High Anxiety) as a Boston cab driver; Graham Jarvis as a Good Samaritan with an ulterior motive; Anne Meara (mom of Ben Stiller) as a nonplussed purse-snatching victim.

Anne Meara: “You carry a pocketbook in this city, you’re a marked woman.”

Billy Dee Williams as Clifford: “I see no reason to assume it won’t show up.”

Graham Jarvis: “Just tell them that Murray sent you.”

Dolph Sweet, Johnny Brown, Anthony Holland and Ron Carey

Director Arthur Hiller paces the film as a frantic run that keeps you on the edge of your seat and as breathless as our protagonists. (Hiller’s masterful direction provided the engine that also made Silver Streak and The In-Laws such memorably fast-moving comedic sprints.) With his bold and original scoring, Quincy Jones skillfully underlines the urban tension and frantic urgency, and displays a sense of humor, too, adding comic musical counterpoint to the proceedings.

But it’s the Sandy Dennis and Jack Lemmon who hold the entire film together with their outstanding performances and palpable screen chemistry, a seemingly mismatched couple but actually a Classic Movie Dream Team. They are the reason I return to this movie again and again.

 (The less said about the execrable 1990s remake, the better, despite the presence of Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin, whom I love in other films.)

This is an entry in the Mismatched Couples Blogathon hosted by Realweegiemidget Reviews and Cinematic Catharsis. What fun we’ll all have this weekend!

Murder by Laughter

If I ever die laughing, I could well be watching a Neil Simon play or film.

Simon is the undisputed king of the deceptively simple one-line zinger...he understands how to set up and pay off a joke so quickly and cleverly that audiences never even see it coming—instead, they dissolve into delightedly surprised laughter. For within every Neil Simon witticism is the human truth that makes it funny. In his plays and films, Simon creates a context in which the most mundane and banal situations are pregnant with humorous possibility.

Unlike his warmhearted romantic comedies about ordinary New Yorkers like Barefoot in the Park, Come Blow Your Horn and The Goodbye Girl, Murder By Death (1976) is a breezy lark with no basis in reality, in which he takes beloved literary stereotypes and imbues them with his earthy humor. The plot is pure mystery movie cliché—a wealthy eccentric invites a group of the world’s greatest detectives to solve a murder that has yet to be committed. The result is nonstop fun.

In this über-clever mystery satire, Simon and a stellar cast bring human failings and foibles to the stock storybook characters that mystery readers know as well as they know themselves—and then Simon performs his magic trick of mining the comedy gold via rapid-fire, rapier-witted dialogue. To breathe life into the story, Simon and director Robert Moore assembled a  talented ensemble of actors, almost all of whom were also stage veterans, adept at fashioning a character and blessed with lightning-accurate timing and feel for pace, rhythm and style. Watching these disparate group of actors working together is a joy to behold.

Guinness and Walker: "My Name Is Yetta. I Cannot Hear or Speak"

Smith and Niven: "A blind butler? Don't let him park the car, Dickie."

Falk: "I think we picked ourselves a queer bird, angel."

Lanchester: "Up yours, fella!"

Coco: "He's dead, all right. That was one of my funniest faces."

Sellers: "Conversation like television set on honeymoon. Unnecessary."

Imagine Sir Alec Guinness as a blind butler saddled with Nancy Walker as a deaf mute cook. Maggie Smith and David Niven as elegant Dick and Dora Charleston, complete with an Asta-lookalike dog.  Peter Falk as the Bogie-inspired Sam Diamond. Elsa Lanchester and James Coco essaying the Agatha Christie-esque characters of British Jessica Marbles and Belgian Milo Perrier. And as the inscrutable Chinese gumshoe Sidney Wang, notorious scene stealer Peter Sellers, so uniquely gifted that he threatens to walk off with the entire film every time he opens his mouth to spout Simon’s fortune-cookie aphorisms. (In spite of his dazzling performance, Sellers reportedly hated making this film, and wrongly predicted it would be a huge flop.)

Capote: "You all mistake what you assume. They never left the dining room!"

Flamboyant Truman Capote, who looks as if he just wandered onto the set from The Merv Griffin Show, was savaged by critics for his performance, unfairly, in my opinion—Capote was forever being (homophobically) excoriated for something, for just being his outrageous self. Here, he strikes the perfect note in his cameo role of Lionel Twain (the name itself a Simon joke, whenever spoken by Sellers’s Sidney Wang). Thank the pop culture gods we have this celluloid remembrance of the famed author and raconteur captured on film.

With their period costumes and stylized portrayals, films like this can really turn off audiences—compare the soufflé light Murder By Death to the execrable and leaden Clue a few years later...or even Simon’s own failure The Cheap Detective. There is, after all, a not-so-subtle distinction between a satire and a spoof.