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Boston-born Jack Lemmon was such an actor. There are others, of course, but Lemmon, like most important artists in any genre, did not accept work simply for commercial reasons.
From his first major role in ‘MR. ROBERTS’ in 1955, directed by Mervyn Le Roy and John Ford, Lemmon revealed a serious yet hilarious ability to express a playful yet socially serious and responsible personality on screen. He also brought an educated and perceptive understanding to his roles, which reflected his Harvard University background; time spent as a New York club’s jazz pianist, and an ensign in the US Navy, the very role he played in ‘Mr. Roberts’.
Right away he won an Oscar for this role, supporting fellow reasonable seaman, Henry Fonda, against the arbitrary and authoritarian James Cagney, the captain of their ship stationed in the South Seas during World War II.
Real-life influences
Lemmon became one of those solid, always interesting Hollywood actors by transferring his real life as a sailor to his first major screen roles. He was in Trinidad for his second seaman role in ‘FIRE DOWN BELOW’ of 1956, starring Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, and himself. It was directed by Robert Parrish, whose consistent concern as a film director seems to have been those sensitive and complicated situations the individual self sometimes encounters among others, often foreigners, or in foreign environments.
‘Fire Down Below’ was filmed in cinemascope and glorious colour in mid-1950s Trinidad, where its adventures involved Mitchum and Lemmon with Rita Hayworth’s notorious sensuality, implying the pun of its title, ‘Fire Down Below’ in reference to her, which made the film a hit with Trinidadian and Guyanese cinema-going fans in the 50s and 60s, when this film was extremely popular.
Lemmon would made two other interesting films in ‘58 and ’59, before working with director Billy Wilder, whose writing and directing were central to bringing to maturity his distinct thematic talents, via four films between 1959 and 68.
Nevertheless, ‘COWBOY’ of 1958, directed by the amazing Delmer Daves, one of the most consistent American filmmakers to frankly oppose both racial and class prejudice in film after film, would become a unique Western, which helped develop the latent Lemmon role as a bungling, awkward newcomer to some experience.
In ‘Cowboy’, Lemmon’s stint is at being a novice cowboy under the hard, experienced Glenn Ford; whereas in ‘BELL, BOOK, & CANDLE’ of 59, Lemmon co-starred as one of Kim Novak’s hilarious beatnik pals in a New York beatnik art circle.
Wilder meets Lemmon
Billy Wilder is one of the best creative film directors Hollywood ever knew, due to his ability to balance social criticism, personal imperfections, comedy, and moral implications, all in each of his films. If fiction writers took stylistic lessons from the films of Billy Wilder, creative writing would probably never lapse into boring reportage.
In 1959, Wilder’s ‘SOME LIKE IT HOT’, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as 1930s Jazz musicians disguised as women fleeing mob boss, George Raft, opened a favourite social theme Wilder would pursue in several films: That of a serious story gradually exposed as ridiculous when compared with the more important pleasures and fun of living.
A nervous and scared Jack Lemmon, along with Tony Curtis, ends up on a train heading to Florida with voluptuous Marilyn Monroe and other playgirls. What starts out as a dangerous situation by accident, gives birth to the opportunity to discover the other positive, enjoyable side of life. But not before much confusion and misinterpretation occur, of course, as when rich retired men fall for Lemmon and Curtis disguised as women.
How are they going to get out of that without revealing their true but concealed identities? Wilder, in one of his consistent skills at bringing a story to its effective climax, has Lemmon, disguised as a woman, tell a rich man who wants to marry him, as they drive in his speedboat: “Look, I have something to confess: I’m not really a woman, I’m a man!” To which the millionaire, unperturbed, replies: “That’s OK; nobody’s perfect.”
‘The Apartment’
It is with ‘THE APARTMENT’ of 1960, that Wilder launched Lemmon’s brilliant thematic acting potential. In Wilder’s films, no one is ideal; they learn the hard way. Lemmon is an office worker who simply wants to get ahead in the impersonal bureaucratic world; so, realizing that most of his superiors have affairs with female staff members, he rents his apartment to them for brief clandestine rendezvous, for which he gets paid extra, and even promoted, but sometimes endures hardship outside in the cold when they are occupied with pleasure.
Lemmon likes the elevator girl, played beautifully by stylish Shirley Maclaine, but she brushes him off, since, unknown to him, she sleeps with his boss, in his apartment which he rents to him for their secret rendezvous.
When their relationship sours, because her boss still prefers his wife to her, Lemmon discovers Maclaine, left overdosed on sleeping pills in his apartment as an attempted suicide. She comes to realize he really loves her, and deserves her love in return when he resigns over the incident.
It is here that Wilder provides Lemmon with the moral theme that is the responsible self each person must awaken. The fact that Lemmon’s bureaucratic employment structure will remain the same, even after he leaves, is Wilder’s point that change comes not really from social structures, which repeat their failures, even with new bosses, but from the responsibility of the individual self.
At the film’s end, when Maclaine rushes back to Lemmon’s apartment to declare her awakened love, she hears a loud explosion outside his closed door, and fears he’s committed suicide by gunshot; but when Lemmon opens the door with an overflowing champagne bottle in his hand, this is Wilder’s brilliant final wisecrack where the ‘pop!’ of an opened champagne bottle in Lemmon’s hand is far better, which any rational person knows, than a gun to his head.
