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Rating:
Nobody is perfect, but perhaps Billy Wilder was. He might have made two or three mistakes at most in an almost unique career that ranged from sentimental operetta to noir, from Hollywood drama to pure comedy, from mystery to sophisticated comedy. In his hunting bag, let's call it that, there are at least a dozen acclaimed masterpieces (are "Double Indemnity", "Sunset Boulevard", "Witness for the Prosecution", "Some Like It Hot", "The Apartment" enough for you?) but he was also, sometimes, too critical of himself. He claimed that "The Fortune Cookie" (a masterpiece) was a minor film, a commissioned job to accept without too many pretensions: "I no longer have the polish of 'The Apartment', it's certainly not a memorable film, you accept it because you're under contract."
The film, dated 1966, is one of his most beautiful and, perhaps, yes, the last great high note. And it’s an immensely entertaining film despite everything that unfolds on screen touches, with ease, the underbelly of humanity, as in the coeval "Kiss Me, Stupid" (1964), very forgotten and perhaps even slightly better than this. Yes, because the characters populating "The Fortune Cookie" are shifty figures, devoured by amorality. No one, not even the whiny mother of the protagonist, has a minimum of intellectual or conscientious honesty; they are all leveled towards the bottom. And sure, the happy ending is not enough to resolve the situation.
We are on a football field. One Boom Boom Jackson, the strongest player of the team on the field, accidentally hits the poor CBS cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon), who is transported to the hospital unconscious. By the next day, he's feeling better and could be discharged. But the brother-in-law, the irresistible shyster lawyer Willie Gingrich (a stunning Walter Matthau in his best role) holds him in bed and forces him to pass as gravely ill, even needing a wheelchair. Why? To obtain the maximum compensation from the insurance company. The insurance, immediately suspecting fraud, sends a detective to stake out in front of Hinkle’s house, just in case he slips up.
From the shady lawyer Gingrich, willing to do anything for a handful of money, to Hinkle’s ex-wife who returns to her ex-husband’s house only because she smells money, to the mother who always cries but, despite her son being confined to a wheelchair (she's unaware of the ongoing fraud), does not give up on her holidays in Florida. Only Hinkle, in the end, will show signs of honesty, and he owes it to Boom Boom Jackson, the only one truly distressed by the incident. The world seen by Wilder (and the legendary screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond) is a place populated by blood-sucking insects willing to do anything to deceive their neighbor. An amoral America where people casually smoke in hospitals and insurance companies seem like high-class criminal lounges.
Thrilling pace, often brilliant dialogue, guaranteed fun and lines that remain etched in stone with the force of great cinema.
It was the first time together for the pair Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau (later exploited by Wilder and others in every way) and it gave Matthau the Oscar, who, poor thing, forced the crew to slow down the shooting due to a heart attack he suffered on set.
In translation: a masterpiece.
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