Photo: MichalPL, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Two old comics who cannot forgive each other
In The Sunshine Boys, released in 1975 and directed by Herbert Ross, Walter Matthau plays Willy Clark, a retired vaudeville comedian who lives alone in a shabby New York hotel room, watches television all day, and nurses a grudge against his former partner that has lasted more than a decade. Willy and Al Lewis, played by George Burns, were once the Sunshine Boys, a beloved comedy double act famous for their doctor sketch. They split up because they could not stand each other, and they have not spoken since. When a television network wants to reunite them for a special about the history of comedy, Willy’s nephew and agent, Ben, played by Richard Benjamin, has to coax two stubborn old men back onto the same stage, and the result is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Matthau plays Willy as a man whose jokes are his armour and whose bitterness is his wound, and the performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
The film was adapted by Neil Simon from his own Broadway play, and Simon’s dialogue is a gift to both actors. Willy’s lines are a mixture of vaudeville gags, complaints about his health, his nephew, his neighbours and the modern world, and sudden, startling moments of honesty. Matthau delivers them with the timing of a man who has spent a lifetime on stage, which is exactly what Willy has done. He knows how to pause before a punchline, how to repeat a word until it becomes funny, and how to turn a complaint into a routine. But he also knows, and shows, that Willy’s comedy is a habit he cannot break, even when it hurts the people around him. He performs for his nephew, for his nurse, for anyone who will listen, because performing is the only way he knows how to be alive.
Matthau and Burns: a perfect mismatch
The pairing of Matthau and George Burns is one of the film’s great pleasures, and one of its great surprises. Burns, who was seventy-nine when the film was made and who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance, plays Al Lewis as a calm, contented old man who has made peace with retirement, lives comfortably with his daughter, and has no desire to reopen old wounds. Matthau’s Willy is the opposite: restless, angry, lonely, convinced that Al ruined his career and his life. Their scenes together are masterclasses in comic contrast. Burns is still, dry and understated. Matthau is restless, loud and constantly in motion, pacing, gesturing, arguing with the air. When they finally rehearse the doctor sketch, and the old routines come back with painful familiarity, the comedy is tinged with sadness, because we can see what they once had, and what they threw away.
Director Herbert Ross, himself a former choreographer with a theatre background, directs with restraint, letting Simon’s script and the two performances carry the film. He shoots Willy’s hotel room as a kind of stage set, cluttered, dim and lonely, and Al’s comfortable home as its opposite, warm and orderly. The contrast tells the story without words: one man has adapted to old age, the other has not. Matthau’s Willy is not a lovable rogue in the manner of Oscar Madison. He is often rude, selfish and impossible, firing nurses, insulting his nephew, and refusing to admit that his memory is failing. Yet Matthau never lets us hate him. He shows us the fear underneath the rudeness: the fear of being forgotten, of being useless, of dying alone in a hotel room with only the television for company.
The doctor sketch and the price of laughter
The film’s centrepiece is the famous doctor sketch, in which Willy plays a patient and Al plays a doctor who keeps misunderstanding him, and it is a brilliant piece of writing and performance. On one level it is simply funny, a vaudeville routine polished over decades. On another level it is the story of Willy and Al’s partnership in miniature: two men talking past each other, each convinced the other is deliberately annoying him, each unable to stop the routine even when it is hurting them. When the sketch collapses during the television rehearsal, because Willy cannot remember his lines and Al cannot bear his improvisations, the failure is devastating, not because the sketch matters, but because it is the last thing they shared. Matthau plays Willy’s humiliation with heartbreaking restraint. He does not cry or shout. He simply goes quiet, and that quiet is more painful than any outburst.
The Sunshine Boys is also a film about show business, and about what happens to performers when the applause stops. Willy’s identity is entirely bound up in being funny, and without an audience he does not know who he is. Matthau, who had himself spent years in the theatre before film stardom, understood that fear intimately, and he brings it to every scene. When Willy watches old clips of himself on television, or when he tries out jokes on a nurse who is not listening, we see a man clinging to the only self he has ever known. It is a performance of great empathy, because Matthau never pities Willy. He respects him, even when Willy is at his worst, and that respect allows the audience to do the same.
Why Willy Clark endures
Willy Clark endures because he is one of the great portraits of ageing in American film, funny and unsentimental at the same time. He is not a wise old man dispensing lessons. He is a difficult old man, full of grudges, jokes and fears, and Matthau’s refusal to soften him is what makes the film honest. The ending, in which Willy and Al part again but with a new, grudging understanding, is not a sentimental reconciliation. It is a recognition that some relationships cannot be fixed, but can still matter, and that two men who cannot live together can still share a history that nobody else understands. Matthau and Burns play that final scene with a restraint that is deeply moving, two old professionals who know exactly how much to show and how much to hold back.
For Past Tunes readers, The Sunshine Boys is essential Matthau, the film where his gift for playing grumpy, funny, lonely men reaches its fullest expression. It is a comedy about the end of a career, the end of a partnership, and the stubborn persistence of laughter in the face of loneliness. Watch it for the jokes, which are superb, and stay for Matthau’s Willy Clark, a man who cannot forgive, cannot forget, and cannot stop being funny, even when being funny is the loneliest thing in the world.