Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)

Cast: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Jonathan Pryce, Bruce Altman, Jude Ciccolella, Paul Butler. Screenplay: David Mamet, based on his play. Cinematography: Juan Ruiz Anchía. Production design: Jane Musky. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: James Newton Howard. 

David Mamet's play about a group of real estate salesmen won the Pulitzer Prize, and Mamet did a fine job of adapting it for the screen, even adding an opening scene in which Alec Baldwin's hyper sales executive presents the group with an ultimatum: close sales on the leads provided them or get fired. It's a play that demands a top notch ensemble, and it gets one on film. Unfortunately, what works for Mamet on stage doesn't work as well on screen. He has a superb ear for the way people talk, the repetitions, non sequiturs, and idiosyncrasies of common speech. On stage, Mamet's verbal rhythms, repetitions, pauses, tics, spasms, and obscenities -- the play has been called "Death of a Fuckin' Salesman" -- become hypnotic. But they lose their coherence in a film, from which we demand visual as well as verbal gratification. The cutting from set to set and from character to character chops up the flow of language and reveals that what these guys have to say to and about each other lacks substance. Even the most sympathetic of the group, Jack Lemmon's aging loser, begins to grate on us. Still, as a portrait of men caught in the rat race of capitalism and awash in toxic masculinity, it has some value. 

Twelve Angry Men (William Friedkin, 1997)

Cast: Courtney B. Vance, Ossie Davis, George C. Scott, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Dorian Harewood, James Gandolfini, Tony Danza, Jack Lemmon, Hume Cronyn, Mykelti Williamson, Edward James Olmos, William Petersen, Mary McDonnell. Screenplay: Reginald Rose. Cinematography: Fred Schuler. Production design: Bill Malley. Film editing: Augie Hess. 

William Friedkin's Twelve Angry Men is not so easily dismissed as an unnecessary remake of Sidney Lumet's classic 1957 film, itself a remake of Reginald Rose's 1954 television drama. Forty years of change have taken place, and although such a jury today would almost certainly have women on it, at least Friedkin's version includes four Black men. One of them, strikingly, is the most virulent racist on the panel: a former Nation of Islam follower played by Mykelti Williamson, who delivers a vicious diatribe against Latinos. Which incidentally brings up another anomaly: There are no Latinos on this jury, even though it is impaneled in New York City, which certainly has a significant Latino population. Oddly, one of the actors, Edward James Olmos, is Latino, but he plays an Eastern European immigrant. The rant of the juror played by Williamson has perhaps even more significance today than it did in 1997, after an election campaign tainted by racist taunts against immigrants: The speech sounds like it might have been delivered at Donald Trump's infamous Madison Square Garden rally. As for the film itself, it retains the 1954 movie's power to entertain, if only the pleasure of watching 12 good actors at peak performance (and in George C. Scott's case, a bit over the peak). It also retains the tendency to preachiness, like a dramatized civics lesson, though maybe we need that more than ever.  

Good Neighbor Sam (David Swift, 1964)

 

Cast: Jack Lemmon, Romy Schneider, Dorothy Provine, Mike Connors, Edward G. Robinson, Edward Andrews, Louis Nye, Robert Q. Lewis, Charles Lane, Linda Watkins, Joyce Jameson. Screenplay: James Fritzell, Everett Greenbaum, David Swift, based on a novel by Jack Finney. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Production design: Dale Hennesy. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Frank De Vol. 

Phffft (Mark Robson, 1954)

Cast: Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon, Jack Carson, Kim Novak, Luella Gear, Donald Randolph, Donald Curtis. Screenplay: George Axelrod. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Art direction: William Flannery. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Friedrich Hollaender. 
 

Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)

Kim Novak was an actress of very narrow range, but in the right role and with a good supporting cast, she made a strong, sexy impact, as she does in Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). In Bell, Book and Candle, she is paired again with her Vertigo co-star, James Stewart, and surrounded by a supporting cast full of scene-stealers: Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester, Hermione Gingold, and Ernie Kovacs. The movie is nothing special: a fantasy romantic comedy with Novak as Gillian Holroyd, a witch who runs a primitive-art gallery on the ground floor of the apartment house where Shep Henderson (Stewart), a book publisher, lives. She puts a spell on him; he leaves his fiancée, Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule), for her but breaks it off when he discovers that he's been hexed. And so on. The movie was made after Vertigo, and Novak and Stewart were re-teamed because of a deal Columbia had made when it loaned out Novak to Paramount for the Hitchcock film. It's not the most plausible of pairings: Novak was 25 to Stewart's 50 -- an age difference that was less problematic in the plot of Vertigo, with its theme of erotic obsession. Stewart chose never to play another romantic lead, but Bell, Book and Candle gives him some good moments to show off his exemplary skill at physical comedy, as in the scene in which he's forced to scarf down a nauseating witches' brew concocted by Mrs. De Passe (Gingold). The screenplay by Daniel Taradash opens up a one-set Broadway comedy by John Van Druten that had starred Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer. It was nominated for Oscars for art direction and for Jean Louis's costumes, but lost in both categories to Gigi (Vincente Minnelli). The cinematography is by James Wong Howe.    

The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)

Jack Lemmon was an actor Billy Wilder trusted almost more than any other. Starting with Some Like It Hot (1959), they made seven films together. I think Wilder may have found Lemmon's bright American likableness the perfect antidote to his own Middle-European cynicism. It shows particularly in one fleeting moment in The Apartment, after Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) has attempted suicide with sleeping pills, and after the doctor (Jack Kruschen) who lives next door to C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) has induced vomiting and left her to recuperate in Baxter's bed. (There is an unnecessary sourness in Wilder's repeated use of suicide as a motif in his comedies: Six years earlier he had Audrey Hepburn's character attempt to kill herself in Sabrina.)  As Baxter is dithering around his apartment after the doctor leaves, he pauses for a moment and plugs in the electric blanket that covers Fran. It's a detail that might -- probably usually does -- go unnoticed, except that it strikes the exact right note about Baxter, who can be so wrong about the large things -- namely, allowing executives at the insurance company where he works to use his apartment for their extramarital liaisons -- but so right about the small ones. The Apartment takes place in the era of male dominance but nascent female assertiveness that was so thoroughly mined by Mad Men: It satirizes the arrogance of the male executives by making the subservient Baxter and the exploited Fran the most sympathetic characters. It also doesn't "slut-shame" Fran for having slept with her boss, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), which would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier, when the Production Code was in full and rigid enforcement. We really are on the cusp of the transition from the prudish 1950s to the permissive 1960s here. This is not to say that The Apartment is any kind of revolutionary film: Its portrayal of women remains on the retrograde side, but the performances of Lemmon and MacLaine make it look smarter than really is.

Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards, 1962)

This melodrama about alcoholic codependency threatens to fall into didacticism, becoming a latter-day temperance lecture, but is rescued by the fine performances of Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as Joe and Kirsten Clay. He's a ladder-climbing public relations man and she's the secretary to one of his clients; they fall in love, get married, have a child, and turn into self-destructive lushes. Eventually, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, and after a couple of harrowing relapses, he climbs out of it, but she refuses to admit that she has a problem that can't be solved with "will power." The film is unexpectedly bleak for one made with a solid Hollywood budget and two big stars -- both of whom received Oscar nominations -- directed by a man more famous for the Pink Panther movies and for his marriage to (and films with) Julie Andrews than for a serious problem drama. Fortunately, the film has a point to make: that alcoholism is a disease that manifests itself differently in each person who suffers from it. Joe, being a sociable type whose job has always involved drinking with clients, is the kind of person who benefits from the sense of community that AA provides. Kirsten, on the other hand, is a loner: an only child with a doting father (Charles Bickford), who when we first see her doesn't drink at all and is given to taking long walks alone on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. It's Joe who introduces her to alcohol, which softens the rough edges of life -- without it, she says, everything looks "dirty." She feels comfortable denying her problem, even when it affects her marriage and her child so severely: At one point, she sets fire to their apartment in an alcoholic haze. They love each other, but she's unable to express her love for Joe unless he drinks with her. The screenplay by JP Miller is a reworking of his TV drama that appeared on Playhouse 90 in 1958, starring Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. There is a bit too much Hollywood gloss on the film, including an Oscar-winning title song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, but the thoughtful core of the narrative manages to surface because everyone resisted the tendency to paste an easy resolution of the Clays' problems on the end of the film.

Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

Twenty years ago (!), when I wrote my book about movies that had been nominated for Oscars, I had this to say about Some Like It Hot: "Hilarious farce and one of the sweetest natured of Wilder's usually acerbic comedies, thanks to endearing performances by [Jack] Lemmon and [Joe E.] Brown, [Tony] Curtis' high-spirited mimicry of [Cary] Grant, and [Marilyn] Monroe's breath-taking luminosity." Today, after all we've learned about sexual orientation and identity, after many feminist critiques of Hollywood's depiction of women, and after many explorations of Monroe's tragic history, that comment sounds a little naive. Plumb beneath the surface of what seems to be mere entertainment and you'll find disturbance in the depths. Take the celebrated ending of the film, for example. Sugar (Monroe) gets Jerry (Curtis), but at what price? As he warns her, he's exactly the kind of guy she knows is bad for her. And Osgood's (Brown) shrugging off the fact that Daphne (Lemmon) is a man is one of the funniest moments on film, but in fact, the two men have the kind of chemistry together (as in the tango scene) that works, whereas Curtis and Monroe have no real chemistry. Is the film making a case, well in advance of its time, for same-sex attraction? Probably not Wilder's conscious intention, but what does that matter? As for the difficulties of working with Monroe that Wilder and her co-stars later complained about -- though Curtis eventually retracted the much-quoted (including by me) statement that kissing her was "like kissing Hitler" -- this remains perhaps her best film and best performance. Imagine the movie with Mitzi Gaynor (originally thought of for the part and on standby in case Monroe bailed on it) and you have nothing like the one we now know. In lesser hands than Wilder's the clichés (men in drag on run from gangsters) would have resulted in a second-rate comedy. The real marvel is that Wilder produced something enduring out of clichéd material. Curtis and Lemmon are great, even though their roles are the traditional comic teaming of a bully (Curtis) and a patsy (Lemmon), the formula already worked over by Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Sometimes what you have to do is take the formula and transcend it.