Asri-unix.230
net.movies
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure
Tue Dec 15 15:10:01 1981
Buddy, Buddy
BC-REVIEW-''BUDDY''
(Newhouse 009)
Film review, suggested for use when ''Buddy Buddy'' opens at local
theaters
By RICHARD FREEDMAN
Newhouse News Service
(UNDATED) Never mind the warm puppies. Real happiness is any film
written and directed by I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder, and starring
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
Not that ''Buddy Buddy'' is out of Wilder's top drawer. It is no
''Some Like It Hot'' or ''The Apartment.'' The targets of its satire
- hippies and hit men, TV censors and sex clinics - have become a bit
frayed around the edges.
And instead of being entirely original, it is based on a French film
infelicitously called ''A Pain in the A--'' when it briefly surfaced
here a few years ago, but written by Francis Veber who also wrote the
delectable ''La Cage aux Folles.''
No, the joy of watching ''Buddy Buddy'' comes not from any
originality in its featherweight plot, but from the incomparable
Matthau and Lemmon doing what they do best.
Matthau is a mobster so suspicious of life that he buys his cigars
one at a time, and so efficient at his job that he already has
dispatched one government witness with a letter bomb and another with
a dash of cyanide in his morning milk.
It's the third, and most important stool pigeon who has him worried
- and nobody can worry like Walter Matthau. If all goes well, Rudy
''Disco'' Gambola (Fil Formicola) will get his from a long-range
rifle shot as he enters the Riverside, Calif., courthouse to testify.
How is Matthau to know that the hotel room he plans to fire from
will be adjacent to one occupied by Jack Lemmon, a CBS censor trying
to woo back his errant wife of 12 years, Celia (Paula Prentiss), from
the sex clinic run by German quack Dr. Zuckerbrot (Klaus Kinski)?
As garrulous as Matthau is laconic, Lemmon pours out his woes to the
would-be assassin and then tries to hang himself in his shower.
Matthau now has not only a tricky assassination to carry off, but a
dithering neurotic on his hands who for some reason thinks the
sourpuss killer is his best friend.
So before he can make his final score - which he hopes will set him
up for the rest of his scroungy life in a Tahitian paradise - Matthau
must cope with Lemmon's nervous stomach and complicated marriage.
This involves rescuing an unwilling Celia from the Institute for
Sexual Fulfillment (''Ecstasy Is Our Business'') and the weird
clutches of its lecherous resident shrink, while driving a spaced-out
hippy (Ronnie Sperling) and his very pregnant mate (Suzie Galler) to
the hospital on time and fighting off the effects of a tranquilizer
with which Dr. Zuckerbrot has injected him by mistake.
Only about half the gags in ''Buddy Buddy'' really work, but the
ones that do work splendidly, including a Mexican chambermaid (Bette
Raya) chattering blithely to Lemmon while he is trussed up like a
turkey in his room, and Matthau disguising himself as a priest to get
through a police roadblock.
Throughout, Wilder keeps the action moving at such a hectic pace
that we forget most of the film is set claustrophobically in a hotel
room. At 75, the old master has a lot to teach younger sprouts about
the proper care and hardling of true knockabout farce.
X X X
FILM CLIP:
''Buddy Buddy.'' Walter Matthau as a hit man and Jack Lemmon as a
wimpy husband in search of his errant wife collide delightfully in
this Billy Wilder farce. Not all the gags work, but the acting and
timing are classic. Rated R. Three stars.
RB END FREEDMAN
nyt-12-09-81 1903est
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n049 1319 10 Dec 81
BC-MOVIE-REVIEW-BUDDY
By VINCENT CANBY
c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - ''Buddy Buddy,'' Billy Wilder's new farce, is slight but
irresistible. It has a screenplay by Wilder and his longtime
collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond (''Some Like It Hot'' and ''The
Apartment,'' among others). It stars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau,
actors who were obviously made for each other, as, respectively,
Victor Clooney, a mild-mannered censor for the Columbia Broadcasting
System, and Trabucco (his only name), a grumpy hulk who walks as if
his feet hurt and makes his living as a mob hit-man.
Further, it features Paula Prentiss as Victor Clooney's wandering,
birdbrained wife, a researcher for CBS-TV's ''60 Minutes,'' who went
off to gather material on something known as the Institute for Sexual
Fulfillment - ''Ecstasy is our business'' - and stayed on to fall in
love with the institute's chief quack (Klaus Kinski).
As if that weren't enough, much of it takes place in a hotel, the
Ramona in Riverside, Calif., where, by chance, Victor, made suicidal
by his wife's philandering, and Trabucco, who's there to assassinate
a mob-squealer about to testify before a grand jury across the
street, find themselves in adjoining rooms.
It should be a law that at least part of every farce should be set
in a hotel, one with paper-thin walls, a pompous desk clerk and a
wisecracking bellhop. It should also have a garrulous chambermaid,
the sort who talks so much she never notices that the guest, whose
room she has come to clean, is bound hand-and-foot to a chair with a
handkerchief stuffed into his mouth.
''Buddy Buddy'' doesn't compare with the greatest Wilder-Diamond
films, including ''The Fortune Cookie,'' which launched Lemmon and
Mathhau as a team, but it is the lightest, breeziest comedy any one
of them has been associated with in years.
There's something most appealing about the simplicity of the
physical production and the small cast. I suspect that one of the
reasons ''Buddy Buddy'' is so congenial, even when a gag doesn't
build to the anticipated boff, is because you never feel intimidated
by it. It doesn't attempt to overwhelm you with the kind of gigantic
sets, props and crowd scenes that made farces on the order of
''1941'' and ''The Blues Brothers'' so oppressive.
''Buddy Buddy'' travels light, unencumbered by expensive special
effects, fueled only by the talents of its actors and its director's
irrepressible sense of the ridiculous.
Wilder's owlish presense is always apparent. Ever ready with a joke,
whether good, bad or indifferent, he continues to be astonished by
the ways of the world, which in this case is Southern California, a
land of perpetual sunshine and fads, and where ultimate happiness is
always just around the corner, that is, if you can find the right
guru, commune, health food or automobile.
Not in a long time has Lemmon been more appealing than he is as the
unhappy husband who still, however, takes a fussy pride in his work.
Matthau's Trabucco goes through the movie pretending to possess a
patience and a sanity that are forever just out of reach. He squints,
he growls, he briefly pauses, eyes raised to heaven, at each new
interference with the busines of the day, which is, of course,
murder-for-pay. In short, he is extremely comic - perhaps our best
farceur.
Though Wilder and his associates have a lot of fun with the sex
clinic, ''Buddy Buddy'' doesn't do as much as it might with the
comedy talents of Miss Prentiss and Kinski. They are over-and-out too
soon. Yet this, too, is one of the virtues of ''Buddy Buddy,'' which,
in this era of inflated running times, seems to be a model of brevity.
nyt-12-10-81 1620est
**********
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