Buddy Buddy

Billy Wilder – 1981 – USA 
 

The great Billy Wilder famously saved the worst for last.  It’s a mystery to me what went wrong.  Wilder himself was sharp as a tack until the day he died.  On this film he reunited with long-time collaborators I.A.L. Diamond, his co-screenwriter on such masterpieces as Some Like it Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960) and One, Two, Three (1961), and actors Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.  Lemmon is a suicidal milquetoast who crosses paths with cynical hit man Matthau.  Somehow they end up at a sex clinic where Lemmon’s estranged wife Paula Prentiss is undergoing treatment with creepy director Klaus Kinski.  Perhaps the issue is that Wilder was at once trying to make a 30s style screwball comedy while also filling it with presumably ribald humor aimed at a 70s/80s audience.  Wilder should have learned from Peter Bogdanovich, who had recently tried similar things and failed; What’s Up Doc? (1973), Nickelodeon (1976), etc.  (See also Richard Lester’s 1984 Finders Keepers for a great example of the exact same problem.)  There are jokes that aren’t bad but just fall flat anyway, and for the most part everything just feels uncomfortable and strained in an embarrassing way.  The only gag that actually made me laugh involved a proud hippie father of a newborn who celebrates by passing around joints in the hospital waiting room instead of cigars.  Despite the big names before and behind the camera, it’s probably only the depraved Kinski who adds any kind of charge to the film; which might be because he’s the only one who seems to belong to the contemporary milieu in which the film is set; everyone else is just pretending it’s 20-40 years earlier and hoping it’ll all work out somehow.