This Day in Film History (Jack Lemmon, ‘America’s Everyman,’ Born)

Feb. 8, 1925— Jack Lemmon came by his flair for the dramatic right from the start, when his flamboyant mother—"Tallulah Bankhead on a road show"—gave birth to her actor son while in an elevator in Newton, Mass.

His mother never had another child after that experience, he chuckled in later years.

Audiences saw themselves in Lemmon to such an extent that a documentary on his career was called “American’s Everyman.”

But it was his intelligence, intense preparation, improvisational skills, and ability to get along with directors with different working methods that made him a favorite with colleagues as well as audiences, leading to eight Academy Award nominations—and two victories—to go along with two Emmys, Kennedy Center honors, and a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute.

I remember when I read the news of his death back in 2001 and feeling stupefied that this actor I had watched since childhood would no longer be making any films. What impressed me especially about his career was how well he moved from primarily comic parts (Mister Roberts, Some Like It Hot) to dramatic ones (Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome). Among today’s actors, I think that only Tom Hanks has handled such a transition so adroitly.

Two films that I saw as pivotal in Lemmon’s career change came in the early Sixties.

With The Apartment (1960), Billy Wilder called on him to make several head-spinning changes from hilarity to near-tragedy, most notably when his drunken Chuck Baxter does the cha-cha as he tosses his jacket onto his bed—only to do a terrified double-take when he realizes that the co-worker he adores is passed out there after swallowing sleeping pills.

Two years later, in Days of Wine and Roses, the humor and charm that Lemmon endows PR man Joe Clay is critical to keeping the audience’s sympathy as he cajoles his wife into taking drinks so he won’t be alone—a decision with leads them on a downward spiral that threatens their marriage and lives.

The actor threw himself so thoroughly into the role that, when Clay experiences the DT’s while in a straitjacket, crew members had to shake the actor to snap him out of his hysterics.

In the 1970s, he made something of a specialty of the middle-aged man at bay—what critic Judith Crist termed a "harassed man — outflanked, outranked and outmaneuvered"—in films like The Out-of-Towners, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The China Syndrome, and the film that won him his Best Actor Oscar, Save the Tiger.

Some more bits of trivia about Lemmon:

*While deeply affected by what he learned about alcoholism in Days of Wine and Roses, it took him another 20 years before he could quit drinking for good.

*Though he readily admitted, in this 1989 “Desert Island Disk” interview, to never learning to read music, he was an accomplished, self-taught pianist who demonstrated his talent in 10 of his 60 films, as noted in Fred Wasser’s 2011 NPR report.

*Wilder and Lemmon made seven films together, including the director’s last, Buddy Buddy (1981).

*He was often cast with Walter Matthau and even directed him in Kotch (1971).

This Day in Film History (Richard Quine, Director of Frothy ‘50s Comedies, Born)

Nov. 12, 1920— Richard Quine, a young B-movie actor who transitioned to a director who collaborated on bubbly ’50s comedies with such stars as Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak, James Stewart, Judy Holliday, and Mickey Rooney, was born in Detroit, Mich.

Under contract for more than a decade to Columbia Pictures, Quine never became a critical favorite the way that fellow directors Billy Wilder and friend Blake Edwards did, perhaps because he wrote comparatively fewer screenplays and exhibited less open cynicism.

But he was adept at getting the maximum number of laughs from material that would have been inert in other hands, and he was trusted enough to guide the early careers of stars like Lemmon and Novak.

The collaboration with Jack Lemmon was crucial in establishing his career and the actor’s. Having started in vaudeville as a child and even singing on the radio for a time, Quine had become a contract player with MGM during WWII, only to tire of the subpar material he was handed. (One of the few good professional products of that employment was his friendship with Mickey Rooney, with whom he would make several friends and the one-season sitcom The Mickey Rooney Show in the mid-1950s.)

But at Columbia, Quine directed Lemmon in his first screen test, and would go on to make six full-length features with the actor, including My Sister Eileen, Operation Mad Ball, Bell, Book and Candle, It Happened to Jane, The Notorious Landlady and How to Murder Your Wife.

Though many cinephiles cite My Sister Eileen as an underrated example of 1950s musical comedy, it was probably Bell, Book and Candle, a romance between a witch and a publisher, that represented him at his peak.

Not only was the experience of working with Lemmon (in a secondary but amusing role) agreeable, but Quine delighted in how Ernie Kovacs could take one of his suggestions and run with it; effectively used cinematographer James Wong Howe to capture the Greenwich Village setting at its enchanting Christmastime best; and directed Stewart in what became the actor’s last role as a romantic leading man.

This 1958 adaptation of John Van Druten’s Broadway comedy was a box-office hit that helped inspire the 1960s sitcom Bewitched. Bell, Book and Candle remains one of the few films to show up regularly in the run-up to both Halloween and Christmas.

That movie was also a product of the long-running project he had been given by Columbia head Harry Cohn: guiding the career of Kim Novak, successor to Rita Hayworth as the studio's designated goddess, a blonde possessed of both stunning allure and ambivalence about the studio's control of her image and roles. In time, the professional association between actor and director turned personal as well, with the two becoming engaged during production of their third film, Strangers When We Meet.

That relationship ended, as most of his did with Quine, who during his life would be married four times and date numerous other actresses, including Holliday and Natalie Wood.

The remaining movie that Quine made with Novak, The Notorious Landlady (1962), was a suspense comedy with an original screenplay written by Blake Edwards that was turned over for radical surgery to Larry Gelbart. 

For a Hollywood used to disasters like Heaven’s Gate, it could not be termed a “troubled production,” but—with a narrative arc that resisted detection—it can safely be called “problematic.” The best guide to it was Gelbart, in his 1998 autobiography, Laughing Matters:

“Quine was in a bind. He needed new pages, lots of them, and he needed them before yesterday. His actors were assembled and he needed to start shooting right away.”

The future developer of the TV adaptation of M*A*S*H, still a relative neophyte to the movies, was assured that what he submitted was fine, and got to meet along the way a youthful hero, Broadway playwright S.N. Behrman. Then came the usual Tinseltown story, “the everyday run-of-the-mill betrayal”:

“One day, working on the last few scenes of the script, I heard gales of laughter coming from the office next to mine, the office of the producer of the picture, Fred Kohlmar. Putting a drinking glass to our common wall, a primitive but time-tested way of eavesdropping, I soon realized that the laughers were Kohlmar and Richard Quine. There was a third laugher in the room. It was S.N. Behrman. What the three men were enjoying so heartily was Behrman’s rewrite of a portion of my rewrite — the one they kept telling me was going so well. Without informing me, Behrman had been working behind me, improving my improvements, with Quine billing and cooing in his ear.”

The outcome of this—pardon the word, MASHup—was, depending on the viewer, idiosyncratic or eccentric. Or, as Lemmon later recalled: “I delivered lines with absolute conviction, and I haven't the faintest idea what they meant."

The lame results didn’t undercut Lemmon’s friendship with his mentor, who (along with Wilder) would shortly serve as best man at the actor’s wedding to Felicia Farr and who would guide him in another black comedy, How to Murder Your Wife.

But Hollywood as a whole would not sustain similar loyalty, particularly as it observed the tepid box-office outcome of Quine’s attempt to follow the example of Wilder and Edwards in expanding into more dramatic territory in films like Synanon (1965), Hotel (1967), and The Moonshine War (1970).

Quine’s initial turn toward TV—persuading the reclusive former movie star Jean Arthur to come out of retirement in 1966 for a sitcom in which he served as executive producer—flamed out after one season. He worked fitfully but more assiduously (and, perhaps, more effectively) in that medium in the 1970s, including three interesting episodes of Peter Falk’s detective series Columbo.

But Quine was becoming increasingly frustrated, even quietly desperate. His last project, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), turned into a nightmare of creative differences and then firing by the film’s mad star, Peter Sellers.

Quine's suicide by gunshot in Los Angeles nine years later resulted, depending on who one talked to, from either failing health or deepening regret that the kind of movies he used to make were no longer given the green light in Hollywood.

(For a perceptive appreciation of Quine's career, I urge you also to read Joe Baltake's April 2018 post on the film blog, "The Passionate Moviegoer.") 

Quote of the Day (Samuel Steward, on What Many Will Experience New Year’s Eve)

“There are six stages in getting drunk. Jocose, amorous, bellicose, morose, lachrymose, and comatose.” —Samuel Steward (1909-1993), Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist, edited by Jeremy Mulderig (2015)

(The image accompanying this post is from Jack Lemmon’s famous drunk scene from the classic 1960 film, The Apartment.)