Movie Preview: Affleck and Damon and Bateman and Viola as Michael’s mom reinvent sneakers –“AIR”

This Nike Air Jordan success story is slated for the first weekend in April, after March Madness, just as the NBA playoffs get rolling.

And yes, the trailer suggests it pushes all the right buttons. April 5, Be Like Mike.

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Classic Film Review: O’Toole & Co. send up the foibles of “The Ruling Class” (1972)

It bowls the viewer over with ham-fisted, theatrical excess, a grandiose exclamation point on the tail end of the Golden Age of screen satire.

Peter Barnes sees to it that his class-eviscerating theatrical talk-a-thon “The Ruling Class” makes it to the screen with the dagger still bloody, although the blood’s somewhat dry on the blade.

On the stage three years before Monty Python’s hilarious and pointed “Upper Class Twit of the Year” contest, on the screen a year or so after that was telecast, director Peter Medak’s not wholly stagebound, ever-so-quotable film version feels stodgy and stale, half a century later.

It’s not the content, the idea of sending up the inbred Etonian/Oxbridge/House of Lords Brits whose “born to rule” privilege is still with us, even though Britain is once again questioning those Hanoverian “Windsors” and the ermine-caped and coddled DNA’s “divine right of kings.” Barnes’ play earned a Nicholas Hytner/James McAvoy revival just a few years back.

The “classic” film? It’s something of a stiff. Built around a madness, heavy makeup and Bloody Marys turn by Peter O’Toole, it finishes with a savage flourish. But the two hours-plus bore that precedes that remains, as they say in the UK, “a bit much.”

Lord Gurney (Harry Andrews), a widowed, titled nobleman and army veteran, dies during an accident that would have exposed the way he got his jollies, had that sort of thing ever become public. His autoerotic asphyxiation while in his dress uniform and cap — and a ballet tutu — goes awry. And just as he was planning to remarry and sire a fresh heir.

Why? The idea of his “mad” son inheriting the title, the seat in the House of Lords and the magnificent pile (Harlaxton Manor was the filming location) and estate is unthinkable to his brother Charles (William Mervyn), and Lord Gurney himself had to give some thought to protecting the family’s bloodline-based privilege.

But the lord gets-off in mysterious ways, and dies, with a big chunk of cash going to charity, a bigger one to his faithful manservant Tucker (Arthur Lowe), and everything else going to wayward Jack.

A man who has worn a monk’s habit, his hair and beard long and a beatific glow about his face for nearly ten years, who thinks he is Jesus “Mark II,” will become Jack Arnold Alexander Tancred Gurney, 14th Earl of Gurney.

Just don’t call him (O’Toole) “Jack.”

With Uncle Charles, his wife Lady Claire (Coral Browne), their nob of a son (James Villiers) and the obliging local C of E bishop (the great Alastair Sim) present, let the debate about the new lord’s “fitness” for his inheritance begin. How does his know he’s truly the Father, Son and Holy Ghost?

“Simple. When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself.“

But but but…surely this cannot stand! Even having “Jack” explained to them by his “foreign” doctor (Michael Bryant) and others, can’t lessen the blow.

“Remember he’s suffering from delusions of grandeur. In reality he’s an earl, an English aristocrat, a member of the ruling class. Naturally, he’s come to believe there’s only one person grander than that: the Lord God Almighty Himself.”

This Jesus naps upon a cross and beams when he talks of love and blessings, the wonders of “His” world. He fails utterly to inspire his relatives to evolve into better people, or to give up their schemes to displace him, or at least marry him off so that another “heir” can be produced and he can be sent back to the “looney bin.”

“We think you should take a wife.”

“Who from?”

The manservant Tucker, more “outspoken” but still on the job after receiving his newly-won wealth, just shrugs at this latest upper class twit.

“Yes, he’s a nutcase. Most of these titled fleabags are. Rich nobs and privileged arseholes can afford to be bonkers. They’re living in a dreamworld, aren’t they, sir? Life’s made too easy for ’em. They don’t have to earn a livin’, so they do just what they want to.”

Director Peter Medak, a refugee from communist Hungary, may have had insights on this “Bolshie” satire of class and privilege. But he shows little flair for comedy or comic blocking. The film never breaks free from that “stagebound” feel. Every scene runs past its payoff with most of the first two acts playing as an endless succession of “let’s not get to the point/the good stuff just yet” prevarications.

There are occasional wacky breaks for a little song and dance, “The Varsity Rag,” public school songs and the like. They’re rather blandly translated to the screen.

The “He thinks he’s Jesus” joke is campy enough, but flogging it to death is a sin. What we stick around for is the fading hope that eventually this nutter will be “accepted” because “We understand each other perfectly. Breeding speaks to breeding.” Jack is just “a little eccentric, perhaps.”

And when he’s “accepted” we doubt he’ll have any trouble fitting in with his fellow “eccentrics” in the House of Lords.

With rank having its privileges, no effort will be spared to provide Jack with a “cure” via a fellow headcase who bills himself as “The High Voltage Messiah” (Nigel Green),.Charles’ mistress (Carolyn Seymour) will be persuaded to marry him.

Madness will be shrugged off, a murder will be covered-up thanks to great wealth’s ability to hide behind the Church and school connections and class. If that sounds dispiritingly “present day,” that’s kind of the point.

The film divided critics and awards groups in its day, but there’s no denying its impact. It was a flop. O’Toole would enter his own “years in the wilderness” that even the cult hit “The Stunt Man” couldn’t end. It would take “My Favorite Year” to truly begin his own third act.

Medak would never be entrusted with anything of this scale again. He’d go on to film “The Krays” and “Romeo is Bleeding” and a lot of American TV.

The movie they left behind, a production launched — mid-bender — when O’Toole secured the rights and could add it to his “Man from La Mancha” schedule, remains a curious and endlessly quotable artifact.

If the play’s as timeless as Hytner maintained it is, it’s a pity the director of “The Madness of King George” didn’t take a crack at making a film using his West End production as a jumping off point.

But perhaps he figured out what O’Toole, Medak and Barnes didn’t, way back when. This sort of talky, madcap-but-myopic satire only works on the stage, where the many pauses allow the many pithy punchlines to become laughlines and the live audience helps carry the load.

Rating: PG, innuendo, scatological humor

Cast: Peter O’Toole, Alastair Sim, Carolyn Seymour, Arthur Lowe, Coral Browne, William Mervyn, James Villiers, Michael Bryant and Harry Andrews.

Credits: Directed by Peter Medak, scripted by Peter Barnes, based on his play. An Avco Embassy release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:33

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Movie Preview: Owen Wilson sends up Bob Ross? “Paint”

The names have been changed, but the PBS painter/mesmerizer and womanizer is plainly the inspiration for this one.

And if there is a comic actor who more embodies the phrase “Happy little clouds” (probably copyrighted, almost certainly not in the film), I’ve not seen him.

“Coming soon” from IFC.

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Netflixable? A Wife and Mother flees her past and her present, to “Stromboli”

A woman’s troubled psychological journey begins at what might be her final destination in “Stromboli,” a Dutch self-help dramedy of the “Eat, Pray Love” variety, performed in English.

It’s a vigorously edited-down version of the novel by Saskia Noort, a Dutch writer known for thrillers, that touches on childhood trauma, adult guilt and what happens after the breaking point that sends our heroine — Sara — fleeing for a volcanic island escape.

A lightweight, hedonistic opening that suggests this “Eat Pray” will be reduced to binge drinking and boinking, pardon my English. But in short order we see that this isn’t “escape” for Sara (Elise Schaap of “Valentino”). it’s a mad, heedless flight. She’s running from something awful, and her flashbacks only hint at what that might be.

A drunken Sara acts-out on the ferry to Stromboli, which we gather she’s visited before. She’s climbing on the railings, and grabbing the snack bar cook for a rough-and-ready quickie back in the kitchen.

Staggering ashore, she renews her acquaintance with the old gent who rents her a cliffside cottage, and her friendship with his donkey, Gustav. She fills her mineral water bottle with vodka, staggers to the volcanic beach and all but dozes off between volcanic tremors.

A paler-than-pale British stranger (Tim McInnerny of “Notting Hill” and “Blackadder”) staggers up, and they strike up a brief, boozy friendship, one that ends when he returns to his “group.” Sara, meanwhile, has lost her bag — all her money, ID and phone. She has to break into the cottage, which she drunkenly trashes. That gets her kicked out, and there’s only so much pub crawling she can do on the barter system.

Awakening in a church, she is “rescued” by Jens (Christian Hillborg), who takes her home to his little hotel. It’s now a retreat for people looking for a sort of life-cleanse, a psychological detox in which giving up booze, etc., for their stay is merely “urged” not ordered.

Jens and Thandi (Neerja Naik) are gurus/counselors. This is where Harold (McInnerny) belonged, with Anna Chancellor, Pieter Embrechts, Taz Munyaneza and others in his “group.” Troubled Sara, dodging calls from the husband she insists she’s dumped, unable to reach her 14 year-old daughter, is added to the activities — group dance, group meals and role-playing group therapy.

You can guess some of what follows. Everybody has a secret shame/sorrow/regret. Some folks will “couple” up. And the role-playing that helps them come to grips with it is pretty traumatizing and extreme in nature. Some will have breakthroughs, but not before Sara acts-out some more — sleeping around, snorting this, insulting that.

The most impressive element to this Michiel van Erp film (“Open Seas” was his) is the way it shifts direction and tone so abruptly that it could give you whiplash. One minute, we’re staggering through the streets of town with Sara and the donkey Gustav enlisted as her pack animal, and the next she’s reluctantly falling into “let’s get to work on YOU.”

Unlike the novel, we don’t see what she went through that put her on that ferry, three sheets to the wind. Joining the story already in progress (in media res) makes it more interesting and more challenging. As Schaap makes a beguiling drunk, we buy in and start to figure out what’s going on.

Others may have more tolerance of “the process” that she finds herself immersed in, its self-help speak and discomfiting, lawsuit-inviting “shock therapy.” The picture wades into that and lost me, or at least lost my interest.

More could have been managed with the “eruption” metaphor that the Stromboli setting invites. Tremors, and all Sara and Harold can agree on is that if this is indeed “the big one,” no one will miss him and her daughter “will be glad” she’s gone.

I appreciated the film’s brisk, breezy way of introducing characters and getting down to business in “treating” their trauma. But I missed that lighter tone, which frankly would have suited the goofy nature of the therapy that Sara endures to get her to reveal and then let go of her “secret.” As “deep” as they wanted to treat this story, it’s never more than a facile, glib gloss of trauma and its treatment.

Mental health is no joke. But ways of treating it can be, and that’s the only kind of “closure” an 85 minute dramedy with sex and drugs and funny drunks and possibly unlicensed therapist “gurus” can provide.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, sex, nudity profanity

Cast: Elise Schaap, Christian Hillborg, Anna Chancellor, Pieter Embrechts, Taz Munyaneza, Neerja Naik and Tim McInnerny

Credits: Michiel van Erp, scripted by Roos Ouwehand and Paula van der Oest, based on a novel by Saskia Noort. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

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Movie Preview: Shannon, Kate Hudson, Don Johnson and Aja hit a Literary Festival upended by “A Little White Lie”

They call them “Reader’s Festivals,” “Book Festivals” and “Writer’s Festivals.”

They used to be organized by colleges and newspapers and the like — some still are. Such events can have a Chamber of Commerce appeal, pulling in readers from all over, filling hotels for readers who want to meet their idols and listen to them talk about “the craft” and read from their works.

I used to work at a university that ran a swell one, where I got to meet folks like McMurtry and Mailer and McInerny and Haley and Erdrich, and worked for a newspaper on the Fla. coast where I got to cover another, where the likes of Susan Orlean came to be feted.

Writers being writers, there were always mishaps, drunken revels, torrid tales and whatnot associated with them. Norman Mailer renting a car at the airport and getting lost between it and the University of North Dakota, Edward Albee cutting a wide swath through whatever college town he happened to be gracing with his presence, Harlan Ellison taking inspiration from the frigid wasteland of North Dakota and the dork recording his reading/lecture/stand-up show that night.

So there’s a LOT to draw from for this comedy, with Michael Shannon pretending to be a reclusive writer, Kate Hudson the festival organizer trying to keep this enterprise operating, Don Johnson, Zach Braff, Wendy Malick, M. Emmett Walsh, Aja, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and others caught up in the heady atmosphere of books and booze.

“A Little White Lie” opens Mar. 3.

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Movie Review: A Grifter by Any Other Name? “Sharper”

As dark as “The Grifters,” as over-the-top as “The Sting,” “Sharper” is a fresh take on a time-tested genre, a “Who can you trust?” tale from the Land of the Big Con.

No, you’re never wholly sure of who’s grifting whom, sometimes to an eye-rolling degree. Maybe the opening image, of a Rolex watch being re-assembled, is a tad on-the-nose, previewing the profligate riches and the clockwork plot to come.

But an outstanding cast headed by Oscar winner Julianne Moore and fresh faces Justice Smith and Briana Middleton, and lifted by bring-it-all-home reliables Sebastian Stan and John Lithgow, make this a thoroughly entertaining winner about predators who make everybody they meet a loser.

An opening credit defines a “sharper” as “someone who lives by their wits,” and creates expectations for every character and every storyline to follow.

That opening “meet cute” in a bookstore? Is lovely “single and I like it” grad student Sandra (Middleton, of “The Tender Bar”) who she seems to be? Is bookstore manager Tom (Smith of the “Jurassic Worlds” and TV’s “The Get Down”) for real?

We watch their romance unfold and wait for a shoe to drop, that first “problem” that only somebody else’s money can solve. No, that’s not a particularly hard to guess secret. But the clockwork con is more of a vehicle for a series of engrossing character studies which follow.

Sandra’s back story is explored, as is Tom’s. Then we meet Max (Stan). And figure out his connection to “Madeline” (Moore).

All along the way, somebody’s playing somebody else. Someone is being groomed by a predator, someone else given a “make over” as part of a mentoring. Every connection is tenuous but essential to making this Rolex — OK “Fauxlex” — tick over.

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Movie Review: A Journalist and a Cop change places in the “Line of Fire” (“Darklands”)

A single mom nags her teen son into getting up and out the door to school. As an Aussie, she’s got one ultimatum that works every time.

“No school, no ‘footie.'”

They arrive, and she stays on campus with him. She’s a cop, and this is where she’s assigned.

But today is the day that justifies why police are assigned to schools where gun rights overrule human rights, as far as kids are concerned. “Active shooter!”

Today is the day everyone finds out how Policewoman Samantha Romans (Nadine Garner) reacts in such a situation. She calls for backup, draws her firearm and freezes. She weeps and cowers as kids flee all around her.

Her own son is among the 20 killed. Is his death the beginning of her torment, or the culmination of it?

Actor-turned-director Scott Major and screenwriter Christopher Gist take a flier on coming to grips with how people respond to the shock and terror of life-threatening danger, and bury that in a far-fetched thriller, “Line of Fire,” which was titled “Darklands” when it was released Down Under.

They flip the script, making Samantha the victim in a scenario that is common in American gunlands, where gun manufacturers, gun lobbyists and gun fetishists bend cowardly politicians into accepting that “cops in the schools” is the solution to an unregulated, often-deranged civilian subculture awash in machine guns.

How do you make a policewoman the victim? Not just by explaining “how these things happen.” As Samantha’s superior throws her under the bus (“She let everyone down.”), harassing phone calls and shouted insults from drive-bys begin.

And then that villain of the right wing gun culture sticks her nose in. Jamie is a laid-off print journalist hellbent on returning to relevance by getting Samantha to talk. Jamie (Samantha Tolj) smacks her lips over the payday that will lead to, the web traffic she can gin up for her website. She will not take “No” for an answer.

Her persistence turns into the ugliest harassment imaginable — shaming, blunt assessments of how Sam is being perceived, lies about how “I understand guilt,” published online taunts and then texting her quarry the crime scene photo of what a semi-automatic weapon did to her teen son’s face.

We barely have time to be appalled at this over-the-top terrorizing when out filmmakers flip the script again. Sam quickly concocts an absurdly detailed plan for revenge that will make her tormentor experience what she went through.

There’s merit in exploring just what leads to that “Lord Jim” moment when any person — soldier, sailor, police officer or civilian — finds out what we’re really made of. The psychology of panic, the knee-buckling terror of facing great peril to do the noble thing and try to save others makes for gripping drama, and in the case of mass shootings, fascinating “good guy with a gun” myth-busting.

But what Major and Gist have concocted trivializes the trauma with every “This reporter is the crazy one” and “She has that coming to her” turn.

Tense scenes of violence are undercut by the extremes that the shattered Sam indulges to in securing her vengeance. Her “particular skills” go far beyond that one expertise every cop on Earth carries into work each day, knowing the system and the people in it well enough to know just what one can get away with, and how.

“Line of Fire” can be unsettling and even wrenching when this or that aspect of the inciting tragedy is touched on and the viewer allowed the grace to consider what anyone — even someone trained to handle such scenarios — would face in such a situation.

But it stumbles from eye-rolling to infuriating all the way to risible as the filmmakers turn professional failure into armed and trained victimhood, and then into savage “learn your lesson” revenge.

Whatever merits this failed morality tale might have had are lost as it lurches into the ludicrous. The real shame here is worth pointing at the people who made this.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Nadine Garner, Samantha Tolj, Brett Cousins, Nicholas Coghlan and Texas Watterston.

Credits: Directed by Scott Major, scripted by Christopher Gist. A VMI Worldwide release.

Running time: 1:44

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Movie Review: A Dolly Impersonator struggles to be “Seriously Red”

Aussie actress Krew Boylan turns out to be a better Dolly Parton impersonator than screenwriter in “Seriously Red,” her self-scripted star vehicle. It’s a self-serious and seriously-confusing identity crisis comedy tucked into what might have been a gender role romp of the “Connie & Carla” variety.

Boylan can Smoky Mountain drawl like Dolly, and offer a fair impression of Parton’s keening Appalachian soprano. But the movie she’s built around her redheaded stepchild of a character is too sexual to be cutesy, and too cutesy to have anything like the edge that seems to have been Boylan’s intent.

We meet “Red” at a “serious misunderstanding.” She’s a real estate assessor who isn’t really making it at work. And for some reason, she’s shown up at the company office party in full Dolly regalia. She’s been obsessed with her since her tweens.

What starts off like a painfully awkward “misread the room” moment can only be turned around by remembering whatever Dolly Partonism — those little pearls that Country Music’s Living Saint has been dropping since she became famous — applies.

“Storms make trees with deeper roots,” maybe? “If you don’t like the road you’re walkin’, start pavin’ a new one!”

“Red” launches into “9 to 5” and saves the day, only to get carried away and fired the next day.

But opportunity knocks in the form of “Teeth” (Celeste Barber), a manager of “tribute performers” like “The World’s Best Impersonator,” a Kenny Rogers (Daniel Webber) act that gets by mainly on facial hair. He barely sounds like Kenny.

What’s a Kenny without a Dolly? Let’s team them up and take this show to Hong Kong! Just don’t ask “Teeth” how she got her nickname, and where her spare set ended up growing.

Has Red finally found what she’s good at? Might Kenny, who is DEEP into character and DEEP into Dolly, be “the one?” How deep might Red go to “become” her idol?

And will Red’s disapproving single Mum (Jean Kitson) finally give her a little credit and a little peace?

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Today’s DVD Donation? “Poppy” comes to tiny Littleton, N.C.

This Aussie indie film is about a teen with Down Syndrome who doesn’t let social expectations or her brother’s concerns keep her from meeting her ambitions.

Hope the patrons of the Willie Jones Public Library appreciate “Poppy.”

Movie Nation, spreading cinema across the southeast, one movies one small public library at a time.

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Classic Film Review: Lemmon and Matthau and Wilder, “The Fortune Cookie,” (1966)

“Race” never figured in the comedies, thrillers and dramas of the great Austrian-American filmmaker Billy Wilder. You can wade through his entire 50 year career and wonder why you never see a Black face.

The rest of his industry in his adoptive home found places to at least recognize American diversity, even in subservient roles — waiters, porters, entertainers, etc. Not Wilder. “Double Indemnity,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Some Like It Hot,” his films can feel “erased” if you look at them through that lens.

And it’s not like he deserves “credit” when he finally made race and Black characters a part of his comic universe in “The Fortune Cookie.” A movie that came out years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s like he was half-heartedly jumping on the bandwagon just as it was finally leaving town.

The film is celebrated as the first teaming of the great comic duo Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, for finally tapping into Matthau’s comic grump persona and winning him an Academy Award. Lemmon and Matthau would go on to team up in nine films, Lemmon would direct his pal in one and act in Matthau’s son’s “The Grass Harp” with him.

But here’s what I distinctly remember about first watching “The Fortune Cookie” on TV as a child. A CBS Sports TV cameraman (Lemmon) gets bowled over on the sidelines of a Cleveland Browns game. His shyster lawyer brother-in-law, “Whiplash Willie” (Matthau) talks him into faking debilitating injuries and suing.

And despite his best efforts, the dogged insurance company investigator Purkey (Cliff Osmond) can’t unmask the fakery, despite staking-out and bugging the injured man’s apartment.

The cameraman, Harry Hinkle, has a conscience, and he sees what this scam is doing to the unknowing footballer (Ron Rich) who fears he has paralyzed the victim for life. The only thing that gets Harry up out of that chair is his outrage when Purkey baits him by calling his new friend a “coon” with a “Cadillac.” Harry decks the racist.

It seems such an obvious “the least he could do” scripted action now, 57 years after “The Fortune Cookie” came out. But it was startling enough to stand out and inform the way the movie sits in the memory, at least for some of us.

As for Wilder, “the least he could do” after making a sizable portion of America invisible for his entire career was to cast Rich, in what would become his biggest role, cast the boxer Archie Moore as running back/kick returner Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson’s dad, and give Boom Boom a story arc and agency, making him a compelling victim at the heart of this “harmless” comic scam.

Watching now, I’m touched by Rich’s sensitive and athletic turn — Boom Boom loses his love for the game and crawls into a bottle thanks to this accident. A guilt-stricken star athlete finds himself turned into Harry’s Black nurse and manservant, and Harry sees it, too, and starts to feel shame for it.

And then you take in the narrow scope of Rich’s career and remember just how difficult it was just to get even a day gig on film or TV in an era which we celebrate for letting Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll break through.

I went into this re-viewing of “The Fortune Cookie” expecting to focus on The Making of Matthau, a mostly-dramatic actor who honked, bellowed and mugged his way into a persona that took over his career with this Oscar-winning turn.

Fast-talking “Whiplash Willie” has a dozen precedents to fling at the insurance company representing the Cleveland Browns, the NFL and Municipal Stadium. He gives everybody — wife, family, kids, nurses and Harry Hinkle the bum’s rush. He bulldozes them with his shtick, his certitude and his manic sales pitch.

“l don’t want my brother-in-law to be a nobody. I wanna see you in a fastback Mustang, Italian silk suits, a decent apartment, a go-go baby all the way!”

“Think of your mother. Think of your mother, Harry. Bronchitis every winter. She shouldn’t be in Cleveland. She should be in Florida, baking her chest!”

Lemmon’s twitchy, antic put-upon Everyman act got him through the ’50s (“Mister Roberts,” “Some Like It Hot,””The Apartment”). We see him aging into the Felix Unger of legend here, paired-up with the blowhard who’d become his perfect comic foil.

“Of course he’s upset. He’s a lawyer – he’s paid to be upset.”

Wilder and his longtime co-writer I.A.L. Diamond concocted a crooked caper that had roles for many a comic character actor, some of them (Sig Rumond as a “specialist” from “Vienna”) dating back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. William Christopher, billed as “Bill,” was years away from his role as the priest on TV’s “M*A*S*H,” when he played a young and insulted young internist here, and Howard McNear put down his “Andy Griffith Show” barber’s scissors to play another client of Whiplash Willie.

That gives the snarky, one-liner-laced script a hint of “screwball” about it.

They filmed this in black and white, which made mid-winter Cleveland even more “Cleveland,” and realistic. They scored something a lot harder to land for such “edgy” subject matter today, the full cooperation of the NFL. If you want to remember the glory that was Keith Jackson announcing a game in the booth, here he is in his salad days.

But beyond the monochromatic cinematography, there’s something faintly dispirited about it all, as if the movie — or at least the guy who made it — felt a little guilt about the “victimless crime” his movie is about, and a racist society’s victims he finally got around to acknowledging existed with this 1966 classic.

“The Fortune Cookie” still plays as funny. Not as funny as “One, Two, Three,” his grandest farce, or the more celebrated “Some Like It Hot.” Matthau makes it amusing. But there’s just a sliver of hope and the tiniest hint of “bittersweet” about it, something Wilder occasionally allowed into his screenplays.

The Old World filmmaker would basically slip into nostalgia after “The Fortune Cookie,” remaking “The Front Page,” setting a couple of his final films in Europe and becoming a Grand Old Man of the Cinema even before he hung it up. But just as in the beginning of his career, his latter years saw him never put another Black actor on screen again.

I wonder if Cameron Crowe, who idolized him and got to know him, ever asked him why that was?

Rating: “passed,” smoking, adult situations

Cast: Jack Lemmon Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West, Sig Rumond and Cliff Osmond.

Credits: Directed by Billy Wilder, scripted by I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder. A United Artists release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:05

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