The slob who started a thousand arguments
In The Odd Couple, released in 1968 and directed by Gene Saks, Walter Matthau plays Oscar Madison, a divorced New York sportswriter whose apartment looks like a crime scene and whose life runs on poker, beer, cigars and cheerful irresponsibility. When his friend Felix Unger, played by Jack Lemmon, is thrown out by his wife and arrives at Oscar’s weekly poker game threatening suicide, Oscar takes him in out of kindness, and almost immediately regrets it. Felix cleans, cooks, fusses and nags, and Oscar, who has spent years perfecting the art of comfortable disorder, finds his home turned into a showroom and his patience worn to nothing. Matthau had created the role on Broadway three years earlier, winning a Tony Award, and on film he gives a performance of such relaxed, lived-in confidence that Oscar feels less like a character and more like a man you have known for years.
The film, adapted by Neil Simon from his own hit play, is built on a simple comic engine: two divorced men, opposite in every habit, trying to share one apartment. Felix is neat, anxious, allergic to everything and obsessed with correct behaviour. Oscar is messy, easygoing, late with his alimony and allergic only to housework. Simon’s dialogue gives both men wonderful lines, but it is Matthau’s delivery that makes Oscar more than a slob. He plays him as a man who genuinely likes Felix, who is grateful for the cooking and the clean shirts, and who is nevertheless driven mad by being mothered. That mixture of affection and exasperation is the whole film, and Matthau holds it together with a shrug, a sigh and a perfectly timed insult.
A partnership made in comedy heaven
The Odd Couple was only the second film pairing of Lemmon and Matthau, after The Fortune Cookie in 1966, but it fixed their partnership in the public imagination for the next thirty years. Lemmon’s Felix is all nerves and high-pitched complaint; Matthau’s Oscar is low, slow and rumbling, a man who answers a crisis by pouring a drink and opening a window. Their rhythms are opposites, and that is why they work. Watch the famous scene in which Felix serves Oscar and his poker friends tiny sandwiches with fancy toothpicks and lectures them on the correct way to eat, while Oscar stares at his plate as if it had personally offended him. Lemmon gets the fussiness; Matthau gets the reaction, and the reaction is what audiences remember.
Director Gene Saks, who had also directed the Broadway production, wisely stays out of the way and lets the two actors and Simon’s script do the work. He opens the play up just enough, with New York locations, the poker game, the disastrous double date with the Pigeon sisters, and the final confrontation, without losing the intimacy of a stage comedy. Matthau, who knew the role inside out, does not overplay it. He does not need to shout to be funny. His Oscar is funny when he is silent, watching Felix dust a lampshade with the concentration of a surgeon, and funny when he finally explodes, because the explosion has been earned by twenty minutes of patient suffering.
Why Oscar Madison endures
Oscar Madison endures because he is not a villain and not a hero, just a recognisable human being. He is selfish, but he takes Felix in when Felix has nowhere else to go. He is lazy, but he works hard at his sportswriting and he loves his poker friends. He is a terrible husband in the past tense, and a loyal friend in the present, and Matthau refuses to tidy those contradictions into a lesson. When Oscar finally throws Felix out, it is both funny and sad, because both men have failed at marriage and are now failing at friendship in exactly the same way. The film’s ending, in which they part with a mixture of relief and regret, works because Matthau lets us see that Oscar will miss Felix, even as he reclaims his mess.
The role also defined a side of Matthau that audiences would love for decades: the lovable slob, the man whose apartment, wardrobe and habits are a mess but whose heart is in the right place. Later films, from The Bad News Bears to Grumpy Old Men, would return to that figure again and again, but Oscar Madison is the original, and Matthau’s performance is the reason the character survived beyond the play, into a beloved television series and into everyday language. Even today, people who have never seen the film know what an “odd couple” is, and they are usually picturing Matthau’s Oscar, feet on the furniture, cigar in hand, wondering why anybody would iron a newspaper.
There is also a craft lesson in the performance. Matthau shows how much comedy can live in behaviour rather than jokes. Oscar’s walk, a shambling, confident amble, tells us everything about a man who has never hurried for housework. His way of eating, talking with his mouth full and reaching across the table, tells us about a man who has lived alone too long. His way of listening to Felix, head tilted, eyes half-closed, tells us about a man who is trying very hard not to lose his temper. None of that is in the dialogue alone. It is Matthau’s body, voice and timing, honed over years on stage, doing the quiet work that makes a farce feel real.
A comedy about divorce, before comedies admitted it
It is worth remembering how daring The Odd Couple was in 1968. Divorce was still a subject that mainstream American comedy treated gingerly, and here was a film about two divorced men, both wounded, both lonely, trying to build a household that is not quite a family and not quite a bachelor pad. Matthau plays Oscar’s loneliness without sentimentality. There is a scene, late in the film, when Oscar sits alone in his apartment after Felix has gone, surrounded by the mess he wanted back, and for a moment the comedy drops away. He looks tired, and older, and not at all triumphant. Then the joke returns, but the moment stays with the audience, because Matthau has shown us the price of Oscar’s freedom.
That balance, between laughter and melancholy, is what separates Matthau from a mere comic actor. He understood that Oscar’s jokes are often defences, ways of avoiding feelings he does not want to examine. When he teases Felix, he is also keeping Felix at arm’s length. When he pretends not to care about the apartment, he is pretending not to care about being alone in it. Matthau never spells this out. He simply plays it, in the pauses between jokes, and the film is richer for it.
For Past Tunes readers, The Odd Couple is the essential starting point for Walter Matthau, the film where his screen persona fully arrived. It is funny in a way that has not dated, because its subject, two incompatible people who cannot live together and cannot quite live apart, is timeless. And it is the foundation of the Lemmon and Matthau partnership, one of the great double acts in film history. Watch it for the jokes, and stay for Matthau’s Oscar Madison, the slob with a heart, the man who would rather be comfortable than correct, and who taught a generation of filmgoers that a messy apartment can be a kind of honesty.