Jack Lemmon, the odd man out

The measure of a star’s impact is often the extent of their dynasty. Once the public appetite for a particular stellar type has been whetted, all manner of copies, parodies and refractions tend to materialise – Monroe spawning Xeroxes from Jayne Mansfield to Mamie Van Doren, Stallone cloned into a cohort of Lundgrens and Van Dammes.

Occasionally, however, a star can hit the bull’s-eye by carving out a patch of turf that’s simply too small to share – which is why, despite almost 40 years of acclaim and bankability, Hollywood has never quite managed to duplicate the appeal and meaning of Jack Lemmon. His slice of the cake may be slender, but it’s his alone, and our continuing taste for it makes him a considerable, if neglected, phenomenon.

Grumpy Old Men, the fifth film to team Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, is an affable confection. It takes that hitherto most urban of American double acts and plants it in the kind of deep-frozen Minnesota town that Rose from The Golden Girls reminisces about so incessantly, where the twosome waddle gamely through the snow in competitive pursuit of sexily kooky new neighbour Ann-Margret. The assured comic professionalism of the performances stops the film from becoming just another anodyne 90s feelgood movie, but unlike their previous joint outings, it all too evidently lacks the sharpness of Neil Simon (writer of their paradigmatic clash – 1967’s The Odd Couple) or the sourness of Billy Wilder (director of the three others – The Fortune Cookie, The Front Page and Buddy Buddy).

What is striking about Grumpy Old Men, as the clunky title indicates, is that it is a Hollywood film prepared to gamble on stars in their 70s. On one level, it is merely the excuse for a succession of rather tired dotage-as-second-childhood gags, little more than Last of the Summer Wine with snowshoes, but it also raises more interesting questions about why Lemmon and Matthau are entrusted to carry a film at an age when most of their contemporaries have retreated to the less strenuous exertions of the talk-show circuit, if they’re able to leave the house at all.

The film career of Lemmon, in particular, is one of striking longevity – how many other actors have gone from sharing the billing with James Cagney to swapping expletives with Alec Baldwin? So many films over so many years (and almost every one with his name above the title) add up to a major contribution – but of what kind? Could it be that, in an unsung way, his persona discloses that American masculinity is able to accommodate a far wider range of sexual identities than we tend to assume?

He is, in some respects, an actor of remarkably little variety. To think of Lemmon is to conjure up an image of harassed fussiness, hypochondria and heavy drinking, tab collars and ties. He is the patron saint of the deskbound – pinpointed indelibly by another character in The Apartment as “some schnook that works in the office”. His rare ventures into the great outdoors have been woefully ill conceived – a spot of steer-roping in Cowboy (1957) was as uncomfortable as the later dip into the all-star action-schlock of Airport ‘77. He has always seemed happier in the kitchen, and almost never took his shirt off.

One of the first generation of Hollywood stars who learned their craft on television (making over 500 TV appearances in the early 50s), Lemmon was never a wide-screen, Technicolor kind of guy. His closest cultural relatives are those narrow-lapelled, exasperated men of American sitcom – Dick van Dyke or Dick York, the husband in Bewitched. His skill lay in evoking the anxious, put-upon, domesticated American male, his stardom based on capturing the neuroses of those who never usually got to be stars at all. When he gets the girl in his early films, there’s always an anxiety that this eminence can’t last, that Rock or Charlton might pop up to grab her in the final reel.

Too restless to be monolithic, too modern to be archetypal, not handsome enough to be a pin-up and too fond of displaying his actorly skills to achieve the still certainty of the truly iconic, he has nonetheless established a space that is recognisably his. It’s primarily a comic space, and his association with that genre above all helps to explain his staying power. Comedians don’t need to fear age the way other performers do – muscles turn to flab, hunks go to seed, but wisecracks and double-takes can come just as easily from a wrinkled face as from a smooth one. Grumpy Old Men celebrates this fact not only in its central casting, but by wheeling out the even more elderly Burgess Meredith to play Lemmon’s lascivious nonagenarian father.

Lemmon’s age and stature have led him into projects about which he should have known better. Embodying the troubled conscience of middle America in The China Syndrome or Missing or peeping out from among the assembled multitudes of JFK and Short Cuts did him few favours other than reaffirming the cachet of his name. A more significant recent role was in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), David Mamet’s story of greed-crazed property salesmen, where one can sense Lemmon’s determination to lay to rest the pernickety houseproud ghosts of his past and flex dramatic pecs with the big boys. Glengarry is typical Mamet, half testosterone-fest and half thesp-in, with Pacino, Ed Harris and the rest queuing up to deliver soliloquies of hirsute abuse or lock horns in stand-offs of choreographed machismo. Lemmon brings to this scenario evocative echoes of earlier versions of backstabbing office life – but where The Apartment leavened its paranoias with humour, Mamet can only see the workplace as a showdown zone, Reservoir Dogs with filing cabinets.

In such an atmosphere, Lemmon acquits himself well enough, turning in a finely tuned portrayal of sweaty desperation (and there is a certain novelty value in hearing Felix Ungar say “motherfucker”). But the film’s almost Jacobean miasma of claustrophobia, deceit and betrayal leaves one pining a little for the less malevolent films of his youth. Glengarry might offer a bleak and savage Reagan-era coda to those older images of white-collar culture, but it’s altogether too butch for Lemmon to feel completely at home in. He was after all, among his other attributes, the most feminine leading man of his generation.

If the office schnook of The Apartment was the founding character of one side of the Lemmon persona, then the other, complementary side had been inaugurated a year earlier in Some Like It Hot (1959). In popular memory, that film is perhaps seen now as belonging to Marilyn Monroe and (to a lesser extent) Tony Curtis, but it also unleashed a femininity in Lemmon that underpinned most of his subsequent key performances. Despite some initial surface indignation and a brief attempt to seduce Monroe, it is Lemmon who commits himself most wholeheartedly to the film’s carnival potentialities. It is his idea to drag up in the first place, he spends far more time en femme than Curtis, and he unforgettably finds himself embroiled in a queer relationship as the film ends. This scenario isn’t an entirely uncongenial prospect, either, if you recall those wonderful images of Lemmon and Joe E. Brown locked in a tango of droll outrageousness, or the former’s delight at the latter’s proposal. We may have been looking at Curtis and Monroe snagging on the yacht, but something has clearly happened off-screen to make Lemmon rattle his maracas with such lavish glee.

The spectre of Daphne was never entirely absent from the rest of Lemmon’s career. The Apartment has an impeccably heterosexual narrative – until you begin to speculate about what displaced desires might fuel Lemmon’s eagerness to cater for his bosses’ sexual requirements, or realise that from certain angles Shirley MacLaine in her elevator operator’s uniform looks unnervingly like Tony Curtis as Josephine. Hints of the forbidden and fragments of the perverse cluster at the edge of many of Lemmon’s films, particularly those which negotiate that tricky area of male-male relationships best described as homosociality.

Homosocial relationships are often the most deeply sustaining ones heterosexual men have, but their non-sexual nature needs to be constantly, anxiously, hysterically underlined, a process which reveals itself both in excessive homophobia (linguistically central to Glengarry Glen Ross) and in the use of women as objects of sexual exchange between men whose greater, unspoken, unspeakable desire is for each other (the plot of The Apartment in a nutshell). It doesn’t take a major feat of critical ingenuity to identify homosociality as the basis of male double-acts, particularly since most of them (comedy being a far shrewder discourse than the lumbering solemnity of critical theory tends to realise) overtly recognise, celebrate and toy with its repercussions. Lemmon and Matthau, situated historically midway between Laurel and Hardy and Ren and Stimpy, have worked this ground with unflagging zest and panache. Grumpy Old Men, in its amiably second-hand way, offers some pleasures of this variety, but to see the partnership firing on all homosocial cylinders you have to go back to The Odd Couple.

This is the definitive Lemmon-Matthau film, one which deals with its queer undercurrents by bringing them out into the daylight and sending them up rotten, as Lemmon twitters in the kitchen and disinfects the poker cards while Matthau blows him kisses and shouts “Hi honey, I’m home”. They aren’t sleeping together (though they play out several scenes in the bedroom), but in every way that really matters they’re an item – moreover, they represent one of cinema’s most telling depictions of a butch-femme couple.

They operate through networks of bickering interdependence, hierarchies of coyness and gruffness, pouts versus shouts, Miss Friss meets El Slobbo Fantastico. It is incontrovertibly real love, which is why the film, like the play which preceded it and the sitcom it generated, found such a receptive audience. The sitcom loaded the dice even more by casting the unambiguously gay-resonant Tony Randall in the Lemmon role, but the film has all the clues for those who need them. Consider the names of the English women ostensibly courted by the duo: Gwendolyn and Cecily, fresh from The Importance of Being Earnest and hence trailing clouds of queer connotation behind them. The Odd Couple is where The Apartment and Some Like It Hot intersect, and as such it’s the film which (if you’ll pardon a pun I’ve been fighting hard against for the whole article) distils the essence of Lemmon.

A nervous disciple of decorum, an insecure fusspot whose femininity was so ingrained he never needed to resort to the broad semaphore of camp, Jack Lemmon’s key performances matter because they show a male stardom without a trace of brawn. He proved that if you were funny enough, then being a real man was nothing but a drag.