These two neighbors have known each other since childhood and have come to develop mutual animosity even through they initially started out as friends. Or perhaps the movie wishes us to believe that this is what friendship between two old single men looks like.
It's not the normal Lemmon-Matthau partnership, where they don't get along because the Lemmon character is too rigid and Matthau too loose in his personal habits. No, in fact Lemmon is the one engaged in the semi-illegal in this one and he's able to dish out as much as Matthau can in terms of pranks and insults.
Anyway, it's a romantic comedy where a slightly younger temptress moves into the neighborhood and disrupts the delicate balance that these lonely old men have found in their decline composed of carefully manicured routines, sedentary hobbies, and a healthy dose of dreams for a quick and painless death.
The drama and, might I say, even the romance are a joke, consisting of a few blips here and there. The drama is perfunctory and the romance seems to be a drop in the tank just to get the characters at each others' throats. This film's strength lies in its comedy. Burgess Meredith, as the clear senior in a film mostly cast by men well past retirement age, delivers a bevy of well-timed inappropriate lines that harken back to sexual playground ribaldry, but the audience lets it pass on account of his age. There are a lot of insults and pranks as well as slapstick from the rest of the cast.
All of this occurs before the backdrop of a frozen Minnesota winter, which looks lovely and also increases the sense of separation between the characters, as no one can go outside without 15 layers of clothes on and it's too cold to do anything out there for long anyway.
If you're a fan of Lemmon and Matthau and want to see them in a uniquely adversarial relationship, this is the one for you. Or if you simply like gerontic comedies.
Honourable Mentions: Out to Sea (1997). A lesser known Matthau-Lemmon film that's of similar quality to this one.
It's not the normal Lemmon-Matthau partnership, where they don't get along because the Lemmon character is too rigid and Matthau too loose in his personal habits. No, in fact Lemmon is the one engaged in the semi-illegal in this one and he's able to dish out as much as Matthau can in terms of pranks and insults.
Anyway, it's a romantic comedy where a slightly younger temptress moves into the neighborhood and disrupts the delicate balance that these lonely old men have found in their decline composed of carefully manicured routines, sedentary hobbies, and a healthy dose of dreams for a quick and painless death.
The drama and, might I say, even the romance are a joke, consisting of a few blips here and there. The drama is perfunctory and the romance seems to be a drop in the tank just to get the characters at each others' throats. This film's strength lies in its comedy. Burgess Meredith, as the clear senior in a film mostly cast by men well past retirement age, delivers a bevy of well-timed inappropriate lines that harken back to sexual playground ribaldry, but the audience lets it pass on account of his age. There are a lot of insults and pranks as well as slapstick from the rest of the cast.
All of this occurs before the backdrop of a frozen Minnesota winter, which looks lovely and also increases the sense of separation between the characters, as no one can go outside without 15 layers of clothes on and it's too cold to do anything out there for long anyway.
If you're a fan of Lemmon and Matthau and want to see them in a uniquely adversarial relationship, this is the one for you. Or if you simply like gerontic comedies.
Honourable Mentions: Out to Sea (1997). A lesser known Matthau-Lemmon film that's of similar quality to this one.