Buddy Buddy

''Buddy Buddy'' is a 1981 American comedy film based on Francis Veber's play ''Le contrat'' and Édouard Molinaro's film '' L'emmerdeur''. It was the final film directed and written by Billy Wilder.

Plot

Hitman Trabucco eliminates two witnesses against the mob. He meets Rudy "Disco" Gambola, before his grand jury testimony against his fellow mobsters, but completing the contract becomes difficult after meeting Victor Clooney, an emotionally disturbed, suicidal television censor, who had many problems for Trabucco. Victor hopes to reconcile with his estranged wife. Trabucco takes a room in the Ramona Hotel in Riverside, California, across the street from the courthouse where Gambola testifies. Their rooms are connected at the hotel. He tries to kill himself, but Victor stops him. Fearing the police are at the courthouse, Trabucco and Victor head to the Institute for Sexual Fulfillment, the nearby clinic where Victor's wife Celia, a researcher for '' 60 Minutes'', gathers information about a segment program. Deciding to live his own life, Victor discovers Celia having an affair with clinic director Dr. Zuckerbrot. They go to the hotel, where the doctor inadvertently injects Trabucco with a tranquilizer intended for Victor. Victor is oblivious to the fact Trabucco is a hitman, volunteers to fulfill his contract when he is impaired from the sedative; he feels his ruined life. After overcoming assorted complications, Victor kills Gambola. However, despite his hope, Trabucco has no intention of staying with his accomplices and parts ways after escaping. Trabucco goes to a tropical island, where months later he unexpectedly sees Victor, who arrives thirsty and exhausted at the dinghy. Victor explains he is wanted by police after blowing up Zuckerbrot's clinic and Celia meets the doctor's female receptionist to become a lesbian couple. Deciding to see the irritating Victor off, Trabucco suggests to his native servant the possibility of reviving the old custom of sacrificing humans in the local volcano.

Cast

Production

Development

'' L'emmerdeur'', a huge hit in Europe, had been released as "A Pain in the Ass" in art houses in the United States, where it had enjoyed moderate box office success. Jay Weston of William Morris Agency, obtained the remake rights and pitched the film for Matthau, Lemmon and Wilder to work on.Walk on the Wilder side The Guardian 15 Apr 1981: 10.

Wilder said of the film: "If I met all my old pictures in a crowd, personified, there are some that would make me happy and proud, and I would embrace them ... but ''Buddy Buddy'' I'd try to ignore."Chandler, Charlotte, ''Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, A Personal Biography''. New York: Simon & Schuster 2002. , pp. 299–304

"I couldn't say no to Billy," Matthau said later, "and I didn't want to say no to being in a Billy Wilder picture. But this wasn't a Billy Wilder picture." "Iz Diamond and I were working on another project," said Wilder, "when William Morris came to us with this one. We looked at the French movie and saw possibilities in it. I would prefer doing an original story or screenplay. The most fun is working on a movie like '' Sunset Boulevard'' or '' The Apartment'', where you start from scratch. Here I found myself with a ready-made thing, but there are certain advantages to that. I didn't have to audition for the studios and pass through Checkpoint Charlie before they would approve the project. We knew we had a starting date, which is rare enough these days."WILDER: A CYNIC AHEAD OF HIS TIME; LOS ANGELES: Farber, Stephen. New York Times6 Dec 1981: A.1.

Wilder said, "I hadn't been working enough, and I was anxious to get back on the horse and do what I do – write, direct. This wasn't a picture I would have chosen." Wilder and Diamond wrote the script in three months - "a record for us" said Wilder - but then they "sat on it" waiting for the Actors Guild strike to end, and for Lemmon and Matthau to become available. The film roughly followed the original, although the ending was changed.

"I aim a movie at pleasing me and maybe 10 of my friends," said Wilder, adding:

That's the only way I know how to operate. The audience senses when you're doing something without any conviction ... To keep your sanity and your self-respect, you must believe that there will be an audience for what you want to do. It may not be the blockbuster of all time, but what is wrong with a modest success? Once you lose the belief that quality will pay off, you are lost. The next thing you know, you're doing a 'Tuesday the 11th' horror story. I could do that if I wanted to. After all, there are still about 360 days left in the calendar.

"It's the funniest script since ''Some Like It Hot''," said Lemmon. "It has no message - it's just fun."

Wilder said the film would be "a bit like ''Some Like It Hot'' ... and hopefully it'll be fast and funny. But unlike ''Kiss Me, Stupid'' this is a commercial movie - nothing arty in it, nothing very serious, somewhere in between '' Stir Crazy'' and George Bernard Shaw." Matthau said: "in farce, the object of the film is to be very funny - not just funny, but very funny. So it's easy. You either are funny, or you're not. The audience has to suspend disbelief totally, and presumably they get some pleasure in return."WALTER MATTHAU: 'I'M SERIOUS WHEN I DO COMEDY' Farber, Stephen. New York Times16 Aug 1981: A.1.

The film was budgeted at $10 million which Wilder said was "less than the average advertising campaign". He gave a key role to Klaus Kinski calling him "an extraordinary actor ... a funny Nosferatau. There hasn't been a face like his since Conrad Veidt." After several years of financial difficulties and releasing few films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had begun to expand the film production under new studio head David Begelman. Wilder had not made a film at MGM since ''Ninotchka'' in 1939. He said:

They've been renting out so much of their studio space to outside people that now they have to find studio space outside for their own pictures. But there seems to be a drive toward it becoming a full studio again. I just regret how the whole thing dissolved by selling off the props and art when Jim Aubrey was hired to supervise the graves here. In the mid-Thirties, studios had a personality. You could recognize an MGM movie from a Paramount movie from a Warner's movie. That's gone ... Every time you saw white living rooms, white beds, white décor, you knew it was an MGM movie. It's like the hotels now. It doesn't matter whether you're in Paris or Istanbul, you're in the same place. Pride is gone, confusion is rampant. People who are in power today and make the decisions couldn't be my second assistant. On the plus side, there is a push to come back. It's not all mercenary. There is enough confidence from Begelman and Frank Rosenfelt to leave us alone and not breathe down our backs.Leo Roars Again Drew, Bernard. Film Comment; New York Vol. 17, Iss. 5, (Sep/Oct 1981): 34-40,80.

Wilder met Veber on the MGM lot when the latter was in Hollywood working on ''Partners''. Wilder gave him a copy of the script and Veber said "I thought then that I saw flaws in it and wanted to tell him about them but I didn't dare. I have too much respect for that man. And who was I, a little Frenchman, to say anything? So I just said 'Very good' and left it at that."'A LITTLE FRENCHMAN' TRIES HIS LUCK IN AMERICA
Los Angeles Times 19 Jan 1982: g4.

Shooting

Principal photography for ''Buddy Buddy'' began on February 4, 1981 and Wilder had problems with writing. "Wilder the writer let Wilder the director down," he stated. "We had to write too fast. The script was done in three months. We always took much longer, but the wheels were rolling, and we had to go forward." Two weeks into filming, the director realized, "It didn't work to have two comics together. I needed someone serious like Clint Eastwood as the hit man instead of a comedian like Matthau." Veber agreed saying Wilder "made the same mistake I made when I wrote the story as a play in Paris. It was not a great success because I did not make the killer tough enough. I changed that when I wrote the film. Lino Ventura played the part as a really hard killer. Billy Wilder cast Matthau in the part and that was a mistake. You cannot be frightened by him. He would have been better off with someone like Charles Bronson." Lemmon on set told a reporter that making the film was "a dream ... Not only do Walter and I know what each of us is going to do. We also had the advantage of three days of rehearsal, something Billy hasn't done before. This movie is like '' The Odd Couple'', with much of it scenes between Walter and me." Lemmon later said he sensed a change in the director's approach to filmmaking. "Billy seemed more tense. He seemed to be pushing harder, forcing it ... It was something I couldn't put my finger on exactly. He had always been open to suggestions I had for my part ... but this time, I didn't feel as welcome with my ideas, so I didn't say anything. Who am I to tell Billy Wilder what he should do?" Matthau was injured on a laundry chute while filming. Wilder said, "If you are an experienced director today, you are old-fashioned. If you don't know where to put the camera, you are a revolutionary nouvelle vague cinematic genius. The only things that seem to do well today are garbage. You pile up cars in a wreck. However, as those pictures are keeping the companies alive and permitting them to subsidize our pictures, I suppose I shouldn't complain. But I complain." Wilder added during filming, "This is my 53rd year in the industry and in that time I've seen a lot of ebb and flow - lately there's been an inordinate amount of ebb. But to paraphrase a line of Simon Wiesenthal's, 'A movie maker who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.' All I know is it's nice to be working." The film was a critical and commercial failure, and in later years Klaus Kinski denied being in it: "The best thing for me about ''Buddy Buddy'' was that not very many people saw it," Wilder said: "It hurts to strike out on your last picture." Anxious to bounce back from the unhappy experience, he and Diamond immediately went to work on what they hoped would be their next project. "Iz and I had so many ideas, we'd work on one for four weeks, and then we'd start another. We'd been burned; we chose wrong with ''Buddy Buddy'', and we didn't want to make another mistake. We'd had some failures, so our confidence wasn't as good."

Reception

Critical reception

Only a few mainstream critics liked the film, one of which being Vincent Canby of ''The New York Times''. Calling it "slight but irresistible," he observed it "doesn't compare with the greatest Wilder-Diamond films, including '' The Fortune Cookie'', which launched Mr. Lemmon and Mr. Matthau as a team, but it is the lightest, breeziest comedy any one of them has been associated with in years." He added, "There's something most appealing about the simplicity of the physical production and the small cast. I suspect that one of the reasons ''Buddy Buddy'' is so congenial, even when a gag doesn't build to the anticipated boff, is because you never feel intimidated by it. It doesn't attempt to overwhelm you with the kind of gigantic sets, props and crowd scenes that made farces on the order of '' 1941'' and ''The Blues Brothers'' so oppressive. ''Buddy Buddy'' travels light, unencumbered by expensive special effects, fueled only by the talents of its actors and its director's irrepressible sense of the ridiculous." He said of Lemmon, "Not in a long time has ebeen more appealing," and he described Matthau as "extremely comic – perhaps our best farceur."

Far less enthusiastic was Roger Ebert of the ''Chicago Sun-Times'', who stated, "This movie is appalling. It made me want to rub my eyes. Was it possible that the great Billy Wilder ... could possibly have made a film this bad? ''Buddy Buddy'' is very bad. It is a comedy without any laughs. (And, yes, I mean literally that it contains no laughs.) But it is worse than that. It succeeds in reducing two of the most charming actors in American motion picture history to unlikable ciphers. Can you imagine a film that co-stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon and yet contains no charm, ebullience, wit, charisma – even friendliness? This whole movie is like one of those pathetic Hollywood monsters drained of its life fluids ... Basically, we are invited to watch two drudges meander through a witless, pointless exercise in farce ... ''Buddy Buddy'' is incompetent. And that is the saddest word I can think of to describe it."

Gene Siskel named it as the worst film of 1981 (Roger Ebert disliked the film as much as Siskel did, but his pick for 1981's worst film was '' Heaven's Gate''). Channel 4 said, "Wilder helming the classic comic pairing of Matthau and Lemmon is always going to be difficult to dismiss, but it has to be said that all involved had seen better days at the time this got made ... There's the recognizable chemistry between the two leads, but little else here to recommend. It would be foolish to come to this movie expecting '' The Odd Couple'' or '' The Apartment'', but you do expect something a little better than this."

Wilder later reflected, "In this Donner Pass expedition known as Hollywood, many fall by the wayside. People eat people. Very few make it. Lately I've been going to more funerals than openings of pictures. Sometimes you have a funeral and an opening on the same day, and you don't feel very good when you see a comedy after you've put somebody to rest or watched the Neptune Society blow his ashes into the Pacific Ocean ... Sometimes I feel the way you feel when you find yourself at a dinner party with an uncongenial group of people and you say, 'I've got a great story, but I'm not going to tell it to them tonight. I'm not interested in entertaining them.' A lot of energy goes into it, and sometimes it doesn't seem as if it's worth the trouble. I've been doing it now for over 50 years."

Box office

The film opened in 700 theaters, the same weekend as '' Rollover'', and finished second with a gross of $2,132,221 and went on to gross $7.3 million in North America.

See also

* Buddy film – a related genre

References

External links

*
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Review of film
at ''The New York Times''
''Buddy Buddy''
at TCMDB
Article on film
at Trailers from Hell
{{Billy Wilder

1981 films
1980s screwball comedy films
American buddy comedy films
American screwball comedy films
American remakes of French films
Films about contract killing
American films based on plays
Films directed by Billy Wilder
Films set in Riverside County, California
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films
Films with screenplays by Billy Wilder
Films with screenplays by I. A. L. Diamond
Films scored by Lalo Schifrin
1981 comedy films
1980s English-language films
1980s American films