Critic Reviews

Lemmon and Mathau's finest hour.

What makes the film so charming is the comic interplay between Matthau and Lemmon.

The Odd Couple, Neil Simon's smash legit comedy, has been turned into an excellent film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Simon's somewhat expanded screenplay retains the broad, as well as the poignant, laughs inherent in the rooming together of two men whose marriages are on the rocks.

Revisiting Saks’ screen version nearly 50 years later is like a class in how comedy and storytelling evolve, and how some aspects of a story endure over time, while others get sloughed away.

A funny screen version of a very funny (if not very significant) Broadway comedy. It does well as an evening's entertainment.

Playwright Neil Simon occasionally takes off his clowns' masks to show the humans beneath. In doing so, he has made his Odd Couple real people, with enough substance to cast shadows alongside the jokes.

Felix and Oscar are now part of the American mythos.

For all its overfamiliarity, this is a good play, easily Simon's best, and Matthau and Lemmon inhabit it with grace and style.

The good news is that, as sitcom-style theater goes, The Odd Couple is often highly amusing, with Lemmon and Matthau ideally cast as prissy neatnik and unmitigated slob.

Saks takes Neil Simon's play pretty much as it comes, but with Lemmon and Matthau to watch, and a generous quota of one-liners, who needs direction?