The Fortune Cookie
Look, “The Fortune Cookie” had me at Billy Wilder directing a script he wrote with his long-time collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond, and featuring the first on-screen collaboration between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau- did the director have to set his wicked comedy in Cleveland and shoot at a Browns game for the first few minutes of the film, as well? Seeing old Municipal Stadium was a welcome piece of nostalgia from this movie, seeing the way the baseball diamond makes the football field a tricky one, that iconic horseshoe shape with the covering stopping on each side of what, in the 1980s, became the Dawg Pound. You don’t get that in “Draft Day,” which also has the Browns at the center of the action. I might have to make “The Fortune Cookie” a regular part of my film diet.
If the Browns, and the Cleveland setting, are surface pleasures from this film, the story itself is the nutrients that make it taste so good. The film starts with Harry Hinkle, Lemmon’s character, at a game where the Browns are playing the Minnesota Vikings. He is a CBS cameraman on the field shooting the game, and he’s told to cover a punt. When the returner, “Boom Boom” Jackson (Ron Rich), is run out of bounds, he accidentally runs into Hinkle, who is unconscious, and taken away on a stretcher. He’s taken to the hospital, where his mother (the hilariously hysterical Lurene Tuttle), sister (Marge Redmond) and brother-in-law (Matthau) are waiting to get word. Harry appears fine, and ready to check out immediately, but Willie, his brother-in-law, has other plans. You see, Willie is an ambulance chaser of a lawyer, and he sees the opportunity for a big payday. The sympathy of Harry’s ex-wife, Sandy (Judi West) might be enough to get him to get on board. The question is, can they get away with it without the insurance company handling the case finding out?
Before I get to the natural part of the film to discuss, I want to give a shout-out to Ron Rich in this film. He gives probably the most invisible great performance I’ve ever seen in a Wilder film. A lot of side characters in Wilder films, especially in his comedies, stand out because they get a great line or moment or two with one of the leads (think Joe E. Brown in “Some Like It Hot”), but “Boom Boom” Jackson is not a comedic character. When the accident happens on the field, he stays by Harry to make sure he is going to be alright. Later on, he comes to visit him in the hospital, and the two develop a friendship out of this shared experience together. The longer the charade goes on, the more Jackson’s guilt grows, and it begins to effect his play on the field. The downward spiral he goes on is the most empathetic part of the film, and he gives the film heart that it doesn’t really get from the caper at the center of it between Lemmon and Matthau. Wilder was a master of ending films, and while it may not be as iconic as his for “Some Like It Hot,” “Sunset Boulevard” or “The Apartment,” the scene between Jackson and Harry is the perfect way for this film to end, bringing it full circle.
Of course, what makes the film hum in between the start and finish- which both take place at Municipal Stadium- is the chemistry of Matthau (who won an Oscar for his role) and Lemmon, and the wicked hilarity of the scheme they’re trying to pull off. Watching Willie Gingrinch try to convince his brother-in-law to go through with this, and how they go about doing so, is one of those perfectly calibrated Wilder-Diamond comedic premises that feels too silly to work, but just grounded enough to be real. The two actors, who would go on to work together many other times over the years, are a great team, and seeing Lemmon get sucked into the scheme, as well as committing to it with the potential of a reunion with his ex-wife on the table, while starting to feel sympathy for the guilt he’s bringing on Jackson, is a thing of beauty, all the while Matthau is spinning the plates, trying to get as much money out of the insurance company as possible. It’s pure joy, from start to finish. Then again, that was always Wilder’s MO every time he made a film.
