Grand-père à louer

Wonderfully unpredictable movie, with fine direction and acting and nice film score. Lemmon should direct more often. Viewer never knows what is going to happen next, although expectation Matthau may die or get killed. Great movie on aging, uplifting and superbly directed, acted and written. A real "10."

I had not seen Kotch for a long time before viewing my VHS copy today and I was really moved with how good it was. Too bad Jack Lemmon never wanted to try directing again. Maybe had the film won an Oscar or two, he could have been persuaded to try.

I think I finally figured out who Walter Matthau modeled his Oscar nominated performance on, it's Casey Stengel. Casey without the double-talk, but the same non-stop garrulousness that I remember from my youth.

But Casey had his captive audience of baseball writers and fans. Poor Joseph Kotcher is a retired salesman who lives with his son and his family. Though he's an excellent babysitter for his young grandson, he's generally underfoot according to his daughter-in-law Felicia Farr. Son Charles Aidman gently persuades him he ought to move into a retirement home.

But Matthau is just a lonely old man, looking for someone to bond with. He finds someone quite unlikely in the person of Deborah Winters, the new babysitter who finds herself pregnant by her boyfriend Darrell Larson. She moves in with him and not in a retirement home and they have some interesting experiences.

Matthau lost the Best Actor Award to Gene Hackman and Kotch similarly lost as Best Picture to The French Connection. Still I think this one has stood the test of time a lot better.

Marvin Hamlisch and Johnny Mercer wrote the song Life Is What You Make It for Kotch and it lost for Best Song to the Theme from Shaft. That one was truly unfortunate.

Kotch is a picture about the person who's your grandfather, old and a bit crotchety and some times a pain in the posterior as Deborah Winters says. But he's also the one with enough life experience to come through in the clutch.

Come to think of it, one of the things that drove Deborah crazy was his insistence on a car with an old fashioned clutch as opposed to automatic transmission.

The mostly unknown KOTCH is one of those pretty-good time fillers, but what it's known for is the different kind of collaboration between multi-screen-buds Jack Lemmon and title star Walter Matthau, who shares nice chemistry with Deborah Winters, an intense and lovely young blond-haired actress who makes a cozy odd couple, and here's what's on her mind about the production:

DEBORAH WINTERS: I went in and read for Jack Lemmon: this is the only picture that Jack directed. You know, actors don't usually end up liking to direct and the reason is it's extremely difficult to direct a picture. It's very, very hard work and the work begins before you're filming, and then of course during filming, and it's long after filming: doing all the editing and post-production...

It's too much work. They like to go in and memorize some dialog for the day's shoot... The make-up man and the hairdresser makes them up and makes them look good, and then they shoot for one day and they go home, and when the picture's over they relax.

It took Jack six years to get this film finally made... And I came in, of course, more on the tail end of it. Nobody would give him the money and he really loved the story and thought it should be made. So he kept working on it and working on it...

And it was something where I went in to audition and Jack felt I really understood "Erica Herzenstiel," and I was the one he wanted from the very beginning... It was a great compliment and I loved working with both of them. They were fantastic men, and characters, and very funny together.

Bittersweet film directed by Jack Lemmon features real-life pal Walter Matthau as an unwanted old codger in Southern California who befriends an unmarried, pregnant teenager. The film makes points on several topics (retirement homes, married life in suburbia, the value of the elderly), yet it doesn't use this material to build momentum--and since the film isn't a satire, the humor (often condescending or sarcastic) comes off as smirking. Matthau does a very fine job--he even convinces us he's a baby lover!--but his relationship with the troubled girl doesn't ring true (worse, Matthau's pinched, icy daughter-in-law is a one-note caricature and nearly unbearable). At one point, Kotch goes on a road trip by bus and sends back lots of postcards to his son, but director Lemmon doesn't use this segment to bolster the plot (it's too sitcom-y with that silly music, like a geriatric version of "Midnight Cowboy"). Lemmon is careful not to flood the movie with teary sentiment; he's generally gracious and attentive, and many of his details are wonderfully wry, but overall the picture feels rather fatigued.

I first saw this back in the late '70's on TV. We loved it in the family, great fun, heart and performances. Matthau's intrepid, smart if slightly 'out There' Kotch is a unique character, well acted, and always someone we root for. It's not much different from the roles he would go onto play in the 90s, but...done by a younger man.

Sometimes the makeup and haircoloring doesn't quite look convincing, but that's okay too. The performance is put across as much by body language and posture as anything else.

The car is a great added touch-the knocking engine and etc a counterpoint to Kotch's own creaky body.

I liked Ellen Geer as the crabby daughter too-was surprised that she wound up in 'Phenomenon' and several other flix(Patriot Games) that I have seen before. Never made the connection.

It is dated sure, but that is inevitable with films. It's worth yer time.

*** outta **** Nice job by Lemmon, too.