Clown Prince

By RICHARD CORLISS

Young Jack Lemmon sits behind the wheel of a convertible in his first film, a 1951 public-service short called Once Too Often. He looks a pleasant fellow, someone to prize as a neighbor in the sunny suburbia of the postwar era. His behavior is that of any blithe burgher: a carefree puff of his cigarette, a heavy foot on the gas pedal, an appreciative glance at a lovely lady as his car draws alongside hers. Then the scene cuts to black and...CRASH!, a sickening fusion of metal and flesh. What begins as comedy, and accelerates toward romance, explodes into heedless tragedy, into death or worse: the souring of the American Dream.

Such was the arc, starting at the apogee and crashing into disillusionment, that Lemmon's characters described in almost 50 fertile years of films. At his death last week, at 76 from cancer, he was fondly elegized as the mostly decent guy up against the New Morality--which is to say, the No Morality. He was the adman in Days of Wine and Roses, watching alcoholic fumes rise from the wreck of his career and marriage. In The Apartment and many pictures that followed (The Out-of-Towners, Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome, JFK), he played a businessman in danger of being betrayed by his own best instincts--the sad-clown face of America at the twilight of its imperial reign, the Organization Man whom the organization would crush. Lemmon in his maturity was Job with a white-collar job.

He was born to the role: son of a Boston executive, prep-school boy, Harvard grad, a Navy ensign (like Mister Roberts' Pulver). From the start he was a master of comic timing, of the buttoned-down double take. That flummoxed look paired nicely with his ricochet vocal rhythms--he'd race through phrases, then put a twist on the crucial word. Unlike most other Hollywood actors, who relax and seem to bathe in their star quality, Lemmon worked hard. He let you read his reading of the character. His acting was less about being than about doing.

But this wasn't mere technique. High hammery wouldn't have earned Lemmon two Oscars and six nominations, plus an Emmy last year for Tuesdays with Morrie. It was instead an acute perception of his characters: men drowning in flop sweat and flailing magnificently as they go down for the last time.

Yet the farceur's instincts never deserted Lemmon; almost alone, he kept upper-middle-class comedy alive long past its prime. In the precision of his diction, the seeming intimacy of his asides, and that dry cackle of a laugh, he was the movies' Johnny Carson. Surely no one devoted as much intelligent energy as Lemmon did to chic, Hollywood-style humor in its mature years. Out of his mouth came acerb insights fashioned by Billy Wilder (seven films), Blake Edwards (six) and Neil Simon (four). The list includes The Apartment, Operation Mad Ball, the Odd Couple--and the all-time funniest farce, Some Like It Hot, in which he and Tony Curtis dress as women and Lemmon falls into character a little too deeply. That was Jack all over: the man whose all-too-agreeable nature led him to wonder if he was man enough.

In his first eminence, Lemmon was usually the nice Joe--"honest, thrifty, methodical, sober, upright and really kinda dull," as he says of himself in Phffft!--getting wooed by prime kooky blonds Judy Holliday and Kim Novak. With Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment and Irma la Douce, he was the shy gent pursuing a knowing woman, the lamb trying to persuade himself to be a wolf. But the Lemmon male was more in control when surrounded by men. From early service comedies like Mister Roberts through all the films in which he played Nellie to Walter Matthau's Butch (The Fortune Cookie, the Odd Couple, the Grumpy Old Men movies), he made himself at home in the blustering camaraderie of the male world. Then fate and circumstance would conspire, and Lemmon would be at an all-night poker party with a cold hand.

As he aged, Lemmon found inspiration in the works of "serious" authors--John Osborne (a TV version of The Entertainer), David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), Raymond Carver (Short Cuts)--writers with the bilious comic flow of a Wilder, but with no happy ending as a reward for all that suffering. In Glengarry Glen Ross, Lemmon is Shelley Levene, a peddler of diseased land and phony hopes, and a failure not because of scruples but because the system he serves is stacked against him.

America, the proudest nation in the 1950s, later slouched into self-doubt, and Lemmon boldly charted that course onscreen. He demonstrated, for an audience not always eager to hear it, the poignant truth of Joe E. Brown's flippant observation to Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot: "Nobody's perfect." Jack Lemmon wasn't either, but he had one great American trait--bravery--that served him well as deft comedian and slapstick tragedian, cunning artist and surpassing entertainer.