Photo: Suvodeb Banerjee, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
The old man who refused to be shelved
In Kotch, released in 1971 and directed by Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau plays Joseph P. Kotcher, a retired salesman in his seventies who lives with his son Gerald and daughter-in-law Wilma in suburban Los Angeles and is slowly being eased towards a retirement home he does not want. Kotch, as everyone calls him, is not senile and not helpless. He is playful, stubborn, funny and sometimes infuriating, a man who treats his baby grandson as a playmate and his daughter-in-law’s house rules as suggestions. When the family decides he would be better off in a home, Kotch does what he has always done when cornered: he walks away, and he starts a new life on his own terms. Matthau, who was only fifty-one when he made the film, plays a man twenty years older with such conviction that audiences forgot the trick entirely, and the performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
The film was adapted by John Paxton from Katharine Topkins’s 1965 novel, and it was Lemmon’s first and only film as a director. That fact matters, because Kotch is above all a film about friendship. Lemmon, directing his closest friend and most frequent co-star, gives Matthau the space to be quiet, odd and tender, without forcing him into the broad comedy that audiences expected. There are funny scenes, especially Kotch’s battles with Wilma over how to look after the baby, but the film’s heart is serious: what happens to an old man when his family, with the best intentions, stops seeing him as a person and starts seeing him as a problem?
A performance built on small behaviour
Matthau’s Kotch is a masterclass in playing age without caricature. He does not rely on a trembling voice or exaggerated shuffling. Instead he gives Kotch a particular physical life: a man who moves a little more slowly than he thinks he does, who naps in chairs, who forgets where he put his glasses and then finds them on his own head, who laughs loudly at his own jokes. He is warm with children, especially with his grandson Duncan, whom he adores, and he is baffled by the adult world’s desire to organise everything. When Wilma hires a young babysitter named Erica, played by Deborah Winters, and instructs her to keep Kotch away from the baby, Kotch’s hurt is quiet and dignified. He does not rage. He simply understands, earlier than anyone else in the film, that he is being managed out of his own family.
That understanding drives the second half of the film. Kotch leaves the house, takes a job at a gas station, rents a room, and befriends Erica, a pregnant teenager who has run away from her own family troubles. The friendship between an old man and a young woman could have been sentimental or awkward, and Lemmon and Matthau handle it with great care. It is not a romance. It is two lonely people, at opposite ends of life, recognising something in each other: a refusal to be told what their lives should look like. Kotch helps Erica prepare for her baby, finds her a place to live, and stands by her when her own family rejects her. In return, Erica gives Kotch something his son’s house no longer gives him: a sense that he is needed, not merely tolerated.
Lemmon behind the camera
Watching Kotch today, it is fascinating to see Lemmon’s direction, because it is so clearly the work of an actor directing another actor. The camera stays close to Matthau’s face. Scenes are allowed to run a little longer than a conventional Hollywood film would allow. Pauses are respected. Lemmon does not cut away from Matthau’s reactions to chase a joke, and he trusts the audience to notice the small shifts in Kotch’s mood, from mischief to loneliness to determination. The film is not perfect; some critics at the time found it slow and episodic, and its gentle pace can feel old-fashioned now. But that gentleness is also its point. Kotch is a film about taking life at an old man’s pace, and Lemmon’s direction honours that pace rather than fighting it.
The supporting cast is strong, with Felicia Farr, Lemmon’s wife, as Wilma, Charles Aidman as Gerald, and Ellen Geer in a small role, but the film belongs to Matthau. He carries almost every scene, and he does so without the safety net of a comic partner. There is no Lemmon beside him to bounce jokes off, no Billy Wilder plot to drive him forward. There is just Kotch, alone in a room, or walking down a Los Angeles street, or talking to a baby, and Matthau makes that enough. It is one of the most exposed performances of his career, and one of the bravest, because it asks the audience to love a character who is sometimes difficult, sometimes childish, and sometimes wrong.
Why Kotch still matters
Kotch matters because it treats old age as a subject, not a joke. In 1971, Hollywood rarely made films about elderly people as central characters with desires, plans and dignity. Kotch insists that an old man is not a problem to be solved but a person to be listened to, and Matthau’s performance is the argument. He shows Kotch’s vanity, his fear of being a burden, his pride in still being able to work, and his deep, almost physical love for his grandson. When Kotch finally makes his own arrangements, moving into a new life with Erica’s baby as part of his chosen family, the ending is not triumphant in a Hollywood sense. It is quiet, provisional and hopeful, which feels honest.
The film also reveals a side of Matthau that his comedies sometimes hid: his tenderness. Kotch is not a schemer like Willie Gingrich in The Fortune Cookie, nor a slob like Oscar Madison. He is a man trying to be good, and failing sometimes, and trying again. Matthau plays that effort without self-pity, and that is why the Oscar nomination was deserved. He was playing a man much older than himself, but he was not doing an impersonation of old age. He was doing what he always did best: observing how people actually behave when they are hurt, proud and determined not to show it, and letting the audience recognise themselves in that behaviour.
For Past Tunes readers, Kotch is the film to watch after the famous comedies, the one that shows Matthau’s range and his friendship with Lemmon at its most generous. Lemmon gave his friend a leading role of real substance, and Matthau repaid him with a performance of great warmth and restraint. It is a film about growing old without giving up, about chosen family, and about the stubborn, funny dignity of a man who refuses to be put on a shelf. Kotch may not be Matthau’s most famous film, but for many admirers it is among his most moving, and it remains a reminder that behind the gruff exterior was an actor of deep and unshowy feeling.