Photo: Sandrine Z, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
A widower learns to date again
In House Calls, released in 1978 and directed by Howard Zieff, Walter Matthau plays Dr. Charley Nichols, a respected Los Angeles surgeon who returns to work after three months in Hawaii following the death of his wife, and discovers that he is suddenly the most eligible bachelor in the hospital. Nurses flirt with him, widows send him sympathy cards with ulterior motives, and his friend Dr. Norman Solomon tries to set him up on a series of disastrous dates. Charley is charming, funny and completely out of practice at romance, and he is also still grieving, unsure whether he wants a new relationship or simply wants his old life back. Then he meets Ann Atkinson, played by Glenda Jackson, a sharp-tongued divorcee admitted to his hospital with a broken jaw, and for the first time since his wife’s death, he meets someone who talks back to him. Matthau plays Charley as a romantic lead of a very particular kind: rumpled, witty, vulnerable and middle-aged, and the result is one of his most charming performances.
The film, written by Max Shulman, Julius J. Epstein and Charles Shyer, is a romantic comedy for grown-ups, a genre that Hollywood rarely attempted in the late 1970s. Its humour comes not from slapstick but from conversation, from two intelligent, wounded people testing each other, arguing, flirting and slowly admitting that they might need each other. Matthau and Jackson are superb together, a pairing that would be repeated, even more successfully, in Hopscotch two years later. Jackson’s Ann is his equal in every way: dry, direct, unimpressed by his reputation, and unwilling to settle for a comfortable affair. Matthau’s Charley has to work for her attention, and watching a man famous for playing lazy schemers and slobs work hard to impress a woman is one of the film’s great pleasures.
A hospital comedy with a heart
House Calls is also a workplace comedy, set in a hospital run, with cheerful incompetence, by the senile chief of staff Dr. Amos Willoughby, played by Art Carney. The hospital is a place of botched administration, petty rivalries and exhausted staff, and Charley, who is a good doctor, is constantly fighting its absurdities while trying to look after his patients. Matthau plays that fight with exasperated humour, the same humour he brought to Oscar Madison and Walter Burns, but softened by grief. When Charley overrules Willoughby to treat Ann properly, or when he stands up for a patient being neglected by the system, we see a man whose professional ethics are as stubborn as his romantic reluctance. He may be a mess in his private life, but he is serious about his work, and that seriousness makes his comedy matter.
Director Howard Zieff, who had a gift for light, character-driven comedy, directs with a breezy, unhurried touch, letting Matthau and Jackson’s scenes breathe. The film is not in a hurry to get them into bed or into a crisis. It lets them talk, argue, have dinner, meet each other’s families, and misunderstand each other in the ways that real people do. Matthau is wonderful in those quiet scenes. He listens to Jackson, really listens, and his reactions, a raised eyebrow, a slow smile, a joke delivered a beat too late because he is still thinking about what she said, make Charley feel like a real man rather than a romantic-comedy type. It is a performance that depends on chemistry, and Matthau and Jackson have it in abundance.
Grief, played as comedy
What makes House Calls more than a pleasant romantic comedy is its honest treatment of grief. Charley is not a widower in the abstract. He misses his wife, he feels guilty about enjoying himself, he is frightened of betraying her memory by falling in love again, and he is also frightened of spending the rest of his life alone. Matthau plays all of that without ever becoming maudlin. There is a scene in which Charley, alone in his house, looks at his wife’s belongings and cannot decide whether to keep them or put them away, and Matthau plays it with a stillness that is deeply moving. Then, a moment later, he makes a joke about it, because that is what Charley does. He jokes to survive, and Matthau understands that jokes can be both a defence and a way back to life.
Ann, too, is grieving in her own way, for a failed marriage and for the independence she has fought to keep, and the film respects both characters’ reluctance. Their relationship does not proceed smoothly. They argue about commitment, about living together, about whether a man and a woman of their age can start again without repeating old mistakes. Matthau and Jackson play those arguments as adults, not as sitcom misunderstandings. They are funny because they are true, because two intelligent people who have been hurt before will test each other before they trust each other, and because Matthau’s Charley, for all his charm, is genuinely afraid of getting it wrong again.
Why Charley Nichols endures
Charley Nichols endures because he shows a side of Matthau that his broader comedies sometimes hid: the romantic, the man who can be tender without losing his wit, and vulnerable without losing his humour. It is a performance that paved the way for Hopscotch, where Matthau and Jackson would play an even more adventurous couple, and it remains a favourite among Matthau admirers precisely because it is so relaxed. He is not playing a schemer or a slob here. He is playing a man trying to live again, and he makes that effort funny, touching and believable all at once.
The film was a commercial success, successful enough to inspire a television series, although without Matthau and Jackson, and it confirmed Matthau’s status as a leading man who did not need to look like a leading man. Audiences loved him as Charley because he looked like them, or like someone they knew: a middle-aged man with a good job, a bad haircut and a heart that was still capable of surprise. That ordinariness, which Matthau never tried to hide, was his greatest asset as a romantic actor. He did not sweep Ann off her feet. He talked to her, argued with her, made her laugh, and waited for her to decide, and that patience feels, even now, like a radical kind of romance.
For Past Tunes readers, House Calls is the Matthau film to watch when you want comedy with warmth, a grown-up love story that does not pretend that starting again is easy, and a reminder that Matthau could be a leading man in the fullest sense. Watch it for the sparkling partnership with Glenda Jackson, and stay for Charley Nichols himself, a widower, a surgeon, a charmer and a grump, a man learning, late in life, that it is possible to grieve and to laugh, and even to love again, at the same time.