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This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The acting in this movie is really good.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) is a sideline camera man at a Cleveland Browns football game. He gets run over by one of the players. He is generally fine recovering in a hospital. His sleazy brother-in-law Willie Gingrich (Walter Matthau) arrives with a scheme to sue for a big pay day. Harry agrees to fake his injuries. Harry still pines for his ex-wife and Willie's sister Sandy. Football player Luther "Boom Boom" Jackson feels guilty for putting Harry in a wheelchair.This is the initial pairing of Lemmon and Matthau. With Billy Wilder's sharp words, this should be epic. While it has a few laughs, this is not the cinematic icon like their other collaborations that most would remember. The two guys have a nice chemistry. It's not fully taken advantage yet but these guys are showing some potential. They just need more screen time together. Lemmon spends more time with the football player.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau's first of many funny pairings together, a funny yarn where both actor's personalities are perfectly suited to their roles. Lemmon is a TV cameraman covering a football game who suffers an accident on the field when a star player charges into him. While convalescing in the hospital, Jack's unscrupulous brother-in-law/attorney (Matthau) sees dollar signs in his eyes and persuades Lemmon to fake extensive damages to milk the insurance company. Lemmon's against the plan until Matthau convinces him that it's the perfect way to win back his ex-wife (Judi West) who Jack still carries a torch for, but who doesn't care anything for Lemmon except getting his money. Ron Rich is an asset as the remorseful football player who injured Jack and feels the need to take care of him. This is almost perfect, except for being a little longer than necessary. Billy Wilder directed, and Walter Matthau won the Best Supporting Actor award for his sleazy con man performance. ***1/2 out of ****

Whereas these days a successful movie series means endless spin-offs and sequels, there was a time when there were brilliant creative teams who got together time and again, producing a kind of motion picture brand that you could trust. The series of comedies written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, directed by Wilder and (many of them) starring Jack Lemmon are such neat works of professionalism and congruent talent that during their heyday in the 1960s they provided a guarantee of smoothly intelligent yet undemanding entertainment.Billy Wilder had one of the most apparently laid back directorial styles of his era. He barely moves the camera, and his shots tend last as long as is practical. But within this fixed frame he juggles everything with expertise. He uses the cinemascope ratio to keep various elements on the screen – for example the camera and microphones which keep stealing into shot as a reminder of the private eyes that are bugging the flat. This idea of keeping things in view without making them centre of attention also applies to Wilder's presentation of comedy. There's a great example where Walter Matthau is on the phone at one edge of the frame, while the rest of the screen reveals the interior of his home. His children skate around while his wife prepares dinner, which culminates in an incidental gag, punctuating the scene, while Matthau's phone conversation remains what the scene is about. This is very much Wilder's way – not to make the jokes leap out at you but to weave them into the background, noticeable but never forced.Lead man Jack Lemmon was by now a familiar piece of Wilder furniture, and you can see why. He has a slightly exaggerated look, with a duck-like face and a manic way of moving, and yet he can also "do normal" and convince us that he is an everyman. Still, this time around he is upstaged by an exuberant Walter Matthau. There are many great facets to Matthau's performance – his sudden overt gestures, his ability to move his hat as if it were part of his body, the way he paces around, managing to get closest to the camera as his voice reaches a bizarre crescendo or his facial expression is at its most absurdly comical. However I think what really makes him fit in here is the way, although he gets all the funniest lines, he doesn't show them off, simply delivering them as if they were the natural thing for his character to say, which of course makes them all the funnier. It's also a lot like Wilder's style of weaving the comedy into the narrative material rather than hammering the jokes home.But what about this narrative material, sharply scripted by Wilder and Diamond? The Fortune Cookie is ostensibly about an insurance scam, but gradually the friendship between Jack Lemmon and the football player who accidentally injured him emerges as the main story arc. It's almost like a love story between two men. I'm not implying anything homoerotic here, simply that the story is structured like a romance with a friendship taking the place of the love angle. The fact that Boom Boom (played by the little-known Ron Rich) is black is not drawn attention to or made an issue of, and this is rather interesting. This picture was made at the height of the civil rights movement, but it is not making an overt point about race, nor is it even a political picture. But it works as a nicely harmonious accompaniment to what was going on in the streets at the time. Wilder comedies could calmly cover areas other pictures couldn't even touch without making a mess.

Jack Lemon is a TV cameraman photographing a football game in Cleveland. A runner, Ron Rich, is knocked out of bounds and propels Lemon into an obstacle. Lemon isn't hurt bad but is being checked out in the hospital when his brother-in-law, Walter Matthau, a shoddy personal negligence lawyer known as "Whiplash Willie," decides that Lemon should fake a partial paralysis so that the insurance company can be bilked. The ruse is elaborate. Every move the insurance investigators make is anticipated by the sedulous Matthau. "We know what they know, but they don't know we know." Ron Rich, the football player, is stricken with guilt at having injured someone. He spends all his time caring for the phony paralytic, neglects practice, and begins drinking. Lemon's wife, Judi West, has run away with a band leader but now, in anticipation of a juicy settlement, returns to him to share his good fortune. Lemon thinks it's love.Most of the movie has Lemon trying desperately to fake his injury, while at the same time being ashamed of doing it. Matthau is grimly determine. Rich is pathos itself. West is slinkily feminine and wily.The movie really belongs to Matthau. He's marvelous as the slimy lawyer. He works out of a cubicle in a huge building and treats his office the way he treated his apartment in "The Odd Couple." A shameless slob, before important visitors arrive he flings some dusty papers out of the way and empties a waste basket on the floor to offer them a seat, meanwhile cheerfully humming a tune from "The Barber of Seville". But Lemon is more than just a straight man. He burns with outrage and humiliation as Matthau coaches him through the performance.The premise is great, and so are Matthau and Lemon, but the movie isn't as antic as some of Wilder's other comedies of the period -- "One, Two, Three" or "Some Like It Hot". It's closer in its intent to "The Apartment," an attempt at blending comedy and poignancy. Maybe in some ways it takes more skill to fuse the two than it does to stick to pure comedy. "Annie Hall", possibly Woody Allen's best movie, succeeded. And Howard Hawks' "Monkey Business" was a serious treatment of a disturbed marriage cloaked in farce."The Fortune Cookie," for all its jokes, doesn't quite cut it. It isn't that some of the jokes are dated, though they are. Well -- having brought up ludic obsolescence, I'll give an example. When Matthau discovers that Lemon's apartment is bugged and being photographed by investigators across the street, their eyes and ears open for any signs of fakery, he begins to play for his audience -- how terrible Lemon's plight is. It's like the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. An innocent young person walks through the woods and is attacked by a wolf pretending to be Grandma and so on -- the last line delivered with a portrait of Whistler's mother behind him. Lemon protests that he'd rather die than be paralyzed. "Better Red Riding Hood than Dead Riding Hood," replies Matthau. Kids, in 1966 we had this thing called "the Cold War." We were the good guys and the evildoers were the communists, or "Reds." There was a genuine threat of a nuclear holocaust, which some of us were willing to risk, and a few were eager for, because, as the expression went, "Better dead than Red." That's the slogan Matthau builds his joke on. Ha ha. Fortunately for everyone, the Cold War ended in 1989 and there has been world peace ever since. Alright. You may now return to your Gameboys.I love the comic theme of Lemon's posturing and Matthau's reckless pursuit of a million dollars, but the melancholy story of Ron Rich's decline and Judi West's low-level cynicism don't really carry enough passion to grip us. Shirley McClaine's hopeless affair with the married phony Fred MacMurray in "The Apartment", though trite, was presented as genuine enough to make us care, but not enough to depress us. But here, Ron Rich's character is depressing and Judi West's is tiresome.A good movie. I wish it had been better.