Tag: Jack Lemmon

Autumn of Lemmon: An introduction on Jack Lemmon

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musingsLeave a comment

If you’re a regular around here, you’ll know that for the last couple of years I have been picking classic films starring one particular actor/actress to focus on for a season.

For example, I’ve had a Summer of Paul, Summer of Marilyn, Winter of Cagney, Spring of Cary, Spring of Bette, and Autumn of ….oh. I’ve never actually done an Autumn of…anyone. So this year I decided on an Autumn of Lemmon, which means I will be watching and writing about Jack Lemmon movies.

Actually, it turns out I’ve already watched more of Jack’s movies than I realized so this one should be easier than some of these features where I was rushing to watch movies and share about them in the same week.

I thought I would kick off this two-three month feature with an introduction post about the life and career of actor Jack Lemmon.

I’ll also let you know what movies I plan to watch at the end of the post so if you don’t want to read all about Jack, you can skip to the end.

Jack Lemmon was born in a way that would have fit in a movie —his mother gave birth to him in an elevator in Boston in 1925.

He was an only child who had some of his first acting experiences in prep schools.  He learned to play piano at a young age, which would help sustain him in more ways than financially over the years

Some actors change their names when they go into the profession, but Jack kept his.

According to Britannica.com, Jack attended Harvard University and was the president of the Hasty Pudding Club, which was known for annual satiric revues.

He took a break from college to serve in the Navy during World War II and then graduated from Harvard in 1947. Broadway was calling so when he left he went to NYC and picked up some theaters jobs. In between he played piano accompaniment to silent films at the Old Knick Music Hall. He later said that watching Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd taught him more about comic technique that acting school ever could have.

“I used to play at the Old Knick Music Hall on Second Avenue in New York, way back in the ’40s when I first started,” Lemmon said. “Some weeks, we didn’t get paid, because there wouldn’t be enough people in there to give us anything. Sometimes you’d get maybe five bucks. We’d split whatever was left on Saturday night. But you got a piece of chicken and French fries every night. You got a meal.”

Lemmon leaned into music in his later years when acting became stressful, his son Chris Lemmon remembered in an interview with NPR.

Jack Lemmon plays the piano at New York’s Old Knick Music Hall in 1947, his first job in the entertainment industry.

“Hollywood is an enormously invasive thing, especially when you reach a level of stardom that my father did,” Chris Lemmon said. “Hollywood owns you, basically — puts you in a headlock. And is a very jealous mistress when you reach that kind of stardom, especially back then. It’s a little less now. So [music] was his escape.”

He always downplayed his musical talents, though, saying it was merely another creative outlet.

Chris was Jack’s son from his first marriage, by the way. He was married to Chris’s mother, Cynthia Sone, from 1950 to 1956. He married Felicia Farr in 1966 and they remained married until his death in 2001.

In addition to working in theater and music, before going into movies, Jack also worked on radio and more than 140 live television shows.  

Like other movie actors, he started in Broadway but his debut performance was not a success. Luckily, it still led him to a contract with Columbia Pictures in 1954.

His first two films — It Should Happen To You and Phffft! — came out that same year and both set him up opposite Judy Holliday, who was already well known for her Oscar performance in Born Yesterday. The tagline they used for It Should Happen to You:

“Introducing Jack Lemmon — a guy you’re gonna like.”

And many people did in that movie and many more over the years.

It didn’t take Jack long to be recognized for all his hard work. He won an Oscar in 1955 for Mr. Rogers for Best Supporting Actor, which surprises me a little because I’m not sure if that was a strong role for him. He was much better in Some Like It Hot (1959) (to me) and The Apartment (1960) which he received Oscar nominations for (both of them) but didn’t win.

He was nominated again for Days of Wine and Roses (1962). He won an Oscar for  Best Actor in Save the Tiger in 1970.

All together Lemmon had 8 Oscar nominations.

The first Jack Lemmon film I ever saw, other than Grumpy Men when I was younger and actually just remembered as I was writing this, was— Some Like It Hot with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis.

I watched it a couple of years ago and wrote about it here.

Lemmon was known to play socially awkward, self-depreciating, slightly clueless characters who often came to a wider understanding of their world by the end of the movie.

It wasn’t the only role he played, but it was the most popular for him. Most film fans agree that he could play serious characters as well as he could comedic roles.

He had a long-term acting partnership with Walter Matthau, with their most well-known partnership in The Odd Couple from 1968, which was based on the play by Neil Simon.

According to Britannica.com, “The film established the pattern for most of their appearances together, with a fussy neurotic (Lemmon) butting heads with a carefree scalawag (Matthau).”

Other Lemmon-Matthau films included The Front Page (1974), Buddy Buddy (1981), Grumpy Old Men (1993), Grumpier Old Men (1995), and The Odd Couple II (1998).

Matthau said that he was once injured on a set of one of their movies.

“Lemmon was white as a ghost. He ran down, and he took off his jacket, and he rolled his jacket up, and he put it under my head. And he said, “Are you comfortable?”… And I said, “I make a nice living.”

No wonder those two hit it off. Jack had his own knack at witty comments, but also thoughtful ones.

“I really can’t be funny unless it’s part of the character. It really bugs me when someone thinks of me as a comic. If I read ‘comedian Jack Lemmon,’ I gag. That means I’m not an actor – which I am.

It’s better to work with a Billy Wilder once or with a John Ford once than to work with four other directors who do not have that touch of genius.

Nobody deserves this much money – certainly not an actor.

“If I’d been bright, I’d have realized that I was horribly uncomfortable, amazingly frustrated, and like any sensible person, I’d have quit. But it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be successful eventually.

And one of his most witty comments came when he died and had inscribed on his tombstone, “Jack Lemmon In:”



Now for the list of movies I’ll be watching and writing about:

Phffft! (September 17)

It Should Happen To You (September 24)

The Fortune Cookie (Oct 2)

The Apartment (Oct. 8)

My Fellow Americans (Oct. 15)

The Notorious Landlady (Oct. 22)

The Odd Couple (Oct. 29)

Irma Dey Deuce (November 5)

Save the Tiger (November 12)

Sources:

https://www.afi.com/laa/jack-lemmon/

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000493/quotes

https://www.npr.org/2011/06/11/137086345/the-secret-musical-life-of-jack-lemmon

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jack-Lemmon

https://www.tcm.com/articles/31457/jack-lemmon-profile-jack-lemmon-8-22

Summer of Marilyn: Some Like it Hot

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, Summer of Marilyn6 Comments

Last week the days got away from me and I completely forgot to watch my Marilyn movie, let alone write about it.

I’m back this week, though, talking about Some Like It Hot with Marilyn, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis.

This was a crazy, hilarious, insane film that had me gasping and laughing through the entire thing. It was released in 1959 and directed by Billy Wilder.

It was something I needed as I’ve felt like my brain has been racing lately with worry and a rushed feeling.

The movie takes place in 1929 with booze being smuggled into a funeral home that is actually a speakeasy.

They are musicians – Jerry and Joe.

The speakeasy gets raided and they don’t get paid

They need money so when they hear that a band needs a couple of replacement girls they decide they need to become women – or well, sort of anyhow. Tony nixes that idea though and says they need to take another job instead but when they go to pick up the car, they witness a mob murder. Now they are forced to dress as women and get as far away from Chicago as they can, which in their case is Florida with the female band.

They buy the clothes and the wig and the makeup and board the train.

That’s when they meet Marilyn, a.k.a. Sugar.

Sugar is a bit of a drinker and they can’t help checking her out, but trying to pretend they aren’t checking her out.

Marilyn sings and dances in this one and shakes a lot which Jack and Tony very much enjoy. Jack, in fact, says he would like to have a cup of that sugar. This is the movie where Marilyn sings, “I Want to be Loved By You” with THAT dress. The one that had to be filmed partially in the dark because it sort of looks like she’s half naked, even though there is fabric there.

It is clear early on that Sugar is an alcoholic who needs her booze. At one point, she sneaks into Jack’s bed looking for booze, which, of course gets him hot under the collar. While it’s Tony that keeps reminding Jack that he is supposed to be a girl, Tony himself gets a bit attached to Sugar himself. When he learns that Sugar dreams of meeting and marrying a millionaire, he decides he’s going to find a way to be that millionaire for her.

While pretending to be a millionaire he does a hilarious impression of Cary Grant, which just cracked me up, especially when he said to Jack later something like, “Of course I’m faking it. No one really talks like that.”

On and on the craziness went on in this movie until my head was spinning with it all and with laughter.

There are a lot of sexual innuendos in the movie, including one where the band leader says,  “A reminder to all you boys out there, all my girls are virtuosos and I intend to keep it that way.”

When Tony reminds Jack that he’s a guy and not a girl, he tells him, “Jerry, there is another problem. Like what are you going to do on your honeymoon?”

That questions ends up being a bit rhetorical as Jack’s character says they haven’t decided where they will go on their honeymoon yet.

According to information online, the movie was made for $2.9 million and made $49 million. Overall since the time it was released, it has made $83 million internationally.

My husband said he read that Marilyn could not stand Jack Lemmon so I Googled to see if this was true. According to the site Slashfilm.com, it wasn’t really that she didn’t like Jack, she just didn’t like anyone at that time. She was lashing out at a lot of people and they got caught in the crosshairs. She was abusing medication at the time and dealing with depression. I guess it is fitting that her character was an alcoholic since she was one in real life at times too.

She was also pregnant during the making of the movie and later went on to have a miscarriage after filming ended. I believe she had a few during her career and I’m sure this was part of her issues during the filming.

She and Tony Curtis actually dated in 1949, which I found interesting. It was only for a couple of months, according to Curtis.

Jack said he liked Marilyn, but felt sorry for her because he could tell she was troubled. He had less scenes with her than Curtis and didn’t have to deal with her habitual lateness as much.

Wilder was completely frustrated with Marilyn through most of the filming because she often could only get through a small amount of dialogue part of the time, after showing up late, according to a couple of articles. She cost the production half a million dollars with all her delays and he made it clear to her he was not happy with her when he held a cast party when the filming was done and did not invite her. She decided she didn’t like him either and told his wife to tell him to do something very anatomically impossible for a person to do with himself.

Years later he said that he didn’t have issues with Marilyn as much as she had issues with herself. He also said that her discombobulated and erratic behavior actually led to some adlibbed moments that made the movie a classic. Still, I think he would have preferred they didn’t have to write her lines on the inside of drawers because her brain was so addled from drinking too much and taking pills.

Wilder and Marilyn did make up before she passed away, especially because he still considered her a brilliant actress despite the issues she had during filming.

A bit of trivia from IMBd:

  • Some people asked why Curtis was so much better at walking like a woman or having female mannerisms than Lemmon and he told an interviewer it was because he tried so hard to be a female he was very tightly wound and overthinking it. Lemmon, on the other hand, “ran out of his dressing room screaming like the Queen of the May,” kept much more of his masculine body language.”
  • Tony later said that he asked Wilder if he could imitate Cary for his stint as the millionaire in the movie. Wilder liked it and they shot it that way. Apparently, Grant saw the parody of himself and stated, jokingly, “I don’t talk like that.”
  • Marilyn wanted the movie to be shot in color (her contract stipulated that all her films were to be in color),but Wilder convinced her to let it be shot in black and white when costume tests revealed that the makeup that Tony and Jack wore gave their faces a green tinge.
  • Marilyn didn’t originally didn’t want to play Sugar. She said, “I don’t want to play someone who can’t tell Daphne and Josephine are really men dressed in drag.”

Another tidbit that I pulled off Wikipedia was that this movie was made without the approval of the Hayes Code, which was a code in the “old days” that determined what could and could not be in movies. It wasn’t long after this movie was released and became a huge success that the Hayes Code was discontinued.

Oh, and I did figure out that the name for the movie comes from the music when Tony asks if Marilyn plays her music hot and she says she does and he says he likes his music slower but “Some Like It Hot.”

Have you seen Some Like It Hot? What did you think of it if you have? Let me know in the comments.

Up next I’ll be watching The Seven Year Itch.

After that I will be watching:

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits