IN a career that spanned almost 50 years Jack Lemmon was seldom a soothing presence. Sweaty, stammering and hyperactive, Lemmon seemed to embody the countertype of the monumental, granite-jawed leading men of the 1950s — stars like John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck.
Where Peck, for example, seemed to embody the World War II squadron leader slipping into middle age and forced to operate on the unfamiliar corporate battlefields of Madison Avenue (“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”), Lemmon was the junior officer eagerly polishing the brass of his superiors (in his Oscar-winning supporting performance in “Mister Roberts”), a tactic he queasily carried with him into the business world (“The Apartment”). Lemmon’s recurring predicament is that of the desperate conformist who ultimately discovers that conformity comes at too high a price.
A new boxed set from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, “The Jack Lemmon Collection” offers five of the feature films that Lemmon made for Columbia Pictures from 1954 to 1964, the decade when he developed from a minor stage and television actor into one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office draws.
Several of Lemmon’s best known films of the period — including “Mister Roberts” and the seven movies, among them “The Apartment” and “Some Like It Hot,” that Lemmon made with the directory Billy Wilder — were made away from Columbia, and are not included here. But it was at his home studio that Lemmon developed his comic persona and honed his skills in a series of richly evocative if modestly budgeted films.

In Mark Robson’s “Phffft” (1954), the earliest title in this set, shows Lemmon’s typical character already well under construction. Based on an unproduced play by George Axelrod that Columbia hoped to get to the screen before Axelrod’s similarly plotted Broadway hit, “The Seven Year Itch,” could be filmed by Fox, “Phffft” casts Lemmon as a prosperous Manhattan tax lawyer whose marriage, to a writer of daytime soap operas (Judy Holliday) has collapsed in a crisis of boredom. After Holliday gets a quickie divorce (“phffft” was the Broadway columnist Walter Winchell’s shorthand for dissolved marriages), Lemmon moves in with his best friend and biggest client, a swinging bachelor playwright played by Jack Carson.
In a set-up that eerily anticipates Lemmon’s later hit “The Odd Couple,” he allows himself to be schooled in the ways of the single life by his more outgoing friend, and in a moment that is clearly meant to get the jump on “Seven Year Itch,” practices his rudimentary seduction techniques on a willing blonde bombshell, played by a young Kim Novak, doing her best to capture Marilyn Monroe’s breathy, little-girl diction.
With the exception of a memorable mambo sequence, much of “Phffft” falls flat, thanks to Robson’s ungainly direction, but the recurring elements of Lemmon’s comedies are settling into place: the longing for sexual adventure confounded by an instinctive commitment to wife and home; the fearsome boss who provokes both craven loyalty and bitter resentment; the temptations of midcentury materialism, as represented by sports cars, stereo equipment and plenteous gin martinis.
In “Operation Mad Ball” (1957), Lemmon plays a variation on his Oscar-winning role in “Mister Roberts” as a sly military fixer. This time he’s a hustling private assigned to a medical unit in France immediately after the war, who organizes a wild party as a way for his enlisted buddies, waiting to be shipped back to the States, to mingle with a newly arrived company of attractive nurses. The fearsome boss this time is a by-the-book captain (Lemmon’s close friend Ernie Kovacs) who has a boss of his own to kiss up to (Arthur O’Connell as an oblivious colonel).
“Mad Ball” was the second of Lemmon’s six films with the director Richard Quine, Lemmon’s most important collaborator after Wilder. A gifted director of comedies and melodramas (“Strangers When We Meet”), Quine eventually found his career overshadowed by that of his longtime writing partner, Blake Edwards, when Edwards began directing as well. But both here and in “The Notorious Landlady” (1962), the other Quine-Edwards film in the set, Quine shows a distinctive way of moving his camera for comic emphasis, dollying in on details or reactions, that breaks with the “invisible” style of the period.
“The Notorious Landlady” finds Lemmon reunited with Ms. Novak, now a major star in her own right, in a comedy thriller set in London. Back in his role as an uncomfortable conformist, Lemmon is a junior American diplomat who is drawn to his attractive landlady (Ms. Novak) over the protests of his supervisor (Fred Astaire). The film is a bit drawn out but sufficiently diverting, with a morbid undertone that strongly suggests Mr. Edwards’s hand. (Lemmon’s next film would be the Edwards-directed “Days of Wine and Roses.”)
The last two films in the set, “Under the Yum-Yum Tree” (1963) and “Good Neighbor Sam” (1964) were both directed by the former Disney animator David Swift, and at their best show a cartoonlike emphasis on exaggerated color and movement. Lemmon is said to have despised “Yum-Yum,” a fairly repulsive sex comedy that seems to have been inspired by Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy” of conspicuous consumption and compulsive seduction.
Miscast in a role originated on Broadway by Gig Young, Lemmon is the proprietor of a Los Angeles apartment complex that he keeps stocked with curvaceous young woman, and he spends much of the movie peeping through windows or listening at keyholes. To Lemmon’s lasting disgust the film was one of the biggest hits of his career.
By comparison “Good Neighbor Sam” is a benign sex farce that finds Lemmon happily married (to Dorothy Provine) and living in a middle-class suburb of San Francisco; complications ensue when his wife’s old college roommate — Romy Schneider as a generic “European” — asks Lemmon to pose as her estranged husband in order to fulfill the terms of an inheritance. Amid much slapstick confusion, Lemmon battles temptation both erotic and economic, as his overbearing boss (this time, the great Edward Andrews), who believes him to be a perfect family man, tries to lure him up the corporate ladder of his advertising agency.
“Sam” was Lemmon’s last film under his Columbia contract and seems to represent the end of an era in other ways: the choice between erotic fulfillment and corporate success that animated so many of Lemmon’s comedies would come to seem less relevant as the ’60s turned into “The Sixties” and taboos began to drop. Lemmon’s career, of course, continued without a pause. (He won another Oscar, this time for best actor, for playing a different sort of businessman in crisis in the 1973 “Save the Tiger.”) But his work was never again quite as central to American culture. No longer a symbol, he was simply an artist.
Da The New York Times, 14 giugno 2009

Aveva il talento del "comico per forza", l’uomo comune, neppure troppo maldestro, che situazioni paradossali (spesso tragicamente paradossali) catapultano nell’universo della risata. Non era un mimo nato, aveva un corpo e una faccia come tutti, senza neppure la sgraziata, invadente aggressività del suo partner Walter Matthau. Era la nevrosi stizzita dove l’altro era il disordine iroso (La strana coppia, con tutti i suoi sequel); era un residuo di onestà timorosa dove l’altro era la frode spudorata (Non per soldi ma per denaro); dei due era, sicuramente, il "secondo", la spalla un po’ succube, sempre irretito, sempre travolto (Prima pagina), anche se poi in realtà era lui ad avere il nome più in alto nei titoli di testa. Jack Lemmon, divo quasi per caso nell’universo hollywoodiano anni Cinquanta e Sessanta, dove tutti i modelli e gli idoli si stavano usurando e dove ancora non si erano imposti gli anti-miti, i piccoletti bruttini, disillusi e feroci degli anni Settanta. Lui non era disilluso ma rassegnato, non era feroce ma frustrato, né bello né brutto, vestito in grigio, senza nemmeno la "grazia" del dropout. Lontani ancora gli echi del Vietnam e della caduta americana, Lemmon non faceva il reduce o il barbone o il pazzo: faceva quasi sempre l’impiegato, il vicino di casa educato e meticoloso, il sottufficiale, il provinciale in città, l’americano medio perbene (almeno in superficie). Fu il volto della folla solitaria, triturato dal mito del successo (irraggiungibile), furbetto ma non mascalzone, uno capace di coprirsi occhi, orecchi e bocca per riuscire a sopravvivere, uno che solo attraverso i tic e le manie dimostrava la sua enorme fatica di vivere.

Lemmon fu, in quegli anni, tutto quello che l’America non voleva sentirsi dire e che forse solo il grande Billy Wilder riuscì a farle digerire, con la sua omerica vivisezione. Wilder, che era sempre andato in caccia di uomini qualunque da fotografare in situazioni spiazzanti (Tom Ewell di fianco a Marilyn in Quando la moglie è in vacanza), lo trovò al momento giusto. Lemmon aveva vinto un Oscar come migliore attore non protagonista nel 1955, rifacendo al cinema il ruolo che aveva interpretato a Broadway in Mister Roberts: come sempre un secondo, dietro al protagonista Henry Fonda, con quella gestualità minuziosa e nervosa che diventerà la sua corda dominante. Aveva avuto il suo momento di pazzia, suonando i bongo e spaccando le lampadine con il pensiero, fratello stregone di Kim Novak, nel film di Richard Quine Una strega in Paradiso (1958). Ma pareva destinato soprattutto alla leggerezza della commedia senza pensieri o alle parti di grande caratterista. Poi arrivò Wilder e in uno dei film più folli del mondo (e di sempre) ribaltò, praticamente, l’ordine dei nomi sopra i titoli e finì per far dilagare, tra la bellezza e la bravura della Monroe e di Tony Curtis, la spasmodica schizofrenia di Jerry/Daphne/Jack, l’uomo tranquillo trascinato in fuga dall’amico Joe, l’unica donna che in Florida riesce ad acchiappare il miliardario vero. A qualcuno piace caldo (una nomination all’Oscar nel 1959) rivela tutte le finezze nascoste del comico Jack Lemmon. Solo lui può essere una donna contemporaneamente tanto incredula e tanto credibile, bruttina e vezzosa, scoordinata e puntigliosa, mai un travestito, neppure quando alla fine si toglie sconsolato la parrucca. L’autore scovò le corde sotterranee dell’attore, forse la capacità di ridere dal di dentro di una conclamata banalità, degli schemi, dei pregiudizi, della vigliaccheria, della tristezza senza speranza dell’uomo medio. Trovò il volto ideale per uno dei suoi film più amari e sardonici, L’appartamento (1960, un’altra nomination), e con C.C. Baxter, l’impiegatino che affitta la sua casa ai capi per le loro avventure extraconiugali, Lemmon individuò il personaggio della sua vita e della sua carriera. Tutta un susseguirsi di timidi mediocri che tentano di vivere da cinici, di indaffarati che un bel giorno si accorgono di avere bruciato la vita nella corsa al successo e tentano disperatamente di fermarsi, magari impazzendo: Il prigioniero della Seconda Strada, l’impiegatino (ancora) che ruba al capo la moglie francese in Sento che mi sta succedendo qualcosa, l’ipocondriaco di Questa è la vita di Blake Edwards e, ancora con Wilder, il truffatore suo malgrado di Non per soldi ma per denaro, l’industriale che va a Ischia per recuperare il cadavere del padre e là trova il suo grande amore (Che cosa è successo tra mio padre e tua madre?), il cronista Hildy Johnson di Prima pagina, dove si ricostituisce la "strana coppia" con Walter Matthau.
Dietro, naturalmente, aveva la tragedia, come dimostrano l’Oscar da protagonista vinto per la sconfinata amarezza di Salvate la tigre (1973) di Avildsen e le numerose parti drammatiche degli anni Ottanta e Novanta (da Missing a JFK - Un caso ancora aperto, da Americani ad America oggi). Ma la molla visibile era là, nella faccia di C.C. Baxter che riordina l’appartamento e scola gli spaghetti con la racchetta da tennis.
Da Il Sole 24 Ore, 1 luglio 2001