Buddy Buddy

To earn his long-awaited retirement, hitman Trabucco eliminates several witnesses against the mob. On his way to his last assignment, Rudy "Disco" Gambola, who is about to testify before a jury at the court of Riverside, California, he encounters Victor Clooney, an emotionally disturbed television censor who is trying to reconcile with his estranged wife Celia. Trabucco takes a room in the Ramona Hotel in Riverside, across the street from the courthouse where Gambola is to arrive soon. As chance would have it, Victor moves into the neighboring room at the same hotel, and after he calls Celia and she rejects his attempts at a reconciliation, he tries to kill himself. His clumsy first attempt alerts Trabucco, and fearing the unwelcome attention of the police guarding the courthouse, he decides to accompany Victor to quietly eliminate him, but he is repeatedly foiled by a series of inconvenient happenstances. Trabucco and Victor drive to the nearby Institute for Sexual Fulfillment, the clinic where Celia, a researcher for 60 Minutes, has enlisted because she has become enthralled with the clinic's director, Dr. Hugo Zuckerbrot. After Celia spurns Victor again, they return to the hotel, where Victor plans to jump off the building after setting himself on fire. While trying to stop him, Trabucco accidentally knocks himself out and Victor, having a change of heart, brings him back inside and tries to take care of him. Meanwhile, Zuckerbrot and Celia devise a plan to have Victor confined in a mental institution; Zuckerbrot arrives at the hotel and after mistaking the injured Trabucco for Victor, injects him with a potent sedative. With Gambola's arrival imminent, Trabucco attempts to fulfill his contract but is too groggy to make the shot. After seeing him assembling his rifle and learning Trabucco's true profession, Victor volunteers to take out Gambola to help his new "best friend". Victor succeeds, and the two escape the police after Trabucco, posing as a priest, has made sure that Gambola is dead, but he refuses Victor's company and heads off alone. Months later, Trabucco enjoys his tropical island's retreat until he is unexpectedly joined by Victor. Victor explains that he is wanted by the police after blowing up Zuckerbrot's clinic, and Celia has run off with the doctor's female receptionist. Desperate to get rid of the irritating Victor, Trabucco suggests to his native servant the possibility of reviving the old custom of sacrificing humans in the local volcano. ==Cast==

Development ''L'emmerdeur, a huge hit in Europe, had been released as A Pain in the Ass'' in art houses in the United States, where it had enjoyed moderate box-office success. Jay Weston of William Morris Agency obtained the remake rights and pitched on the film for Matthau, Lemmon and Wilder to work. Wilder said of the film, "If I met all my old pictures in a crowd, personified, there are some that would make me happy and proud, and I would embrace them ... but Buddy Buddy I'd try to ignore." "I couldn't say no to Billy," Matthau said later, "and I didn't want to say no to being in a Billy Wilder picture. But this wasn't a Billy Wilder picture." Wilder said, "I hadn't been working enough, and I was anxious to get back on the horse and do what I do – write, direct. This wasn't a picture I would have chosen." The film roughly followed the original, although the ending was changed. Wilder said that the film would be "a bit like Some Like It Hot ... and hopefully it'll be fast and funny. But unlike Kiss Me, Stupid, this is a commercial movie - nothing arty in it, nothing very serious, somewhere in between Stir Crazy and George Bernard Shaw." The film was budgeted at $10 million, which Wilder said was "less than the average advertising campaign". Wilder first met Veber for lunch at the MGM commissary when the latter was in Hollywood working on the screenplay for Partners (1982). Wilder gave him a copy of the script, and Veber said, "I thought then that I saw flaws in it and wanted to tell him about them but I didn't dare. I have too much respect for that man. And who was I, a little Frenchman, to say anything? So I just said 'Very good' and left it at that." Shooting Principal photography for Buddy Buddy began at MGM in Culver City on February 4, 1981. From the beginning, Wilder had problems with the script. "Wilder the writer let Wilder the director down," he stated. "We had to write too fast. The script was done in three months. We always took much longer, but the wheels were rolling, and we had to go forward." Two weeks into filming, the director realized, "It didn't work to have two comics together. I needed someone serious like Clint Eastwood as the hit man instead of a comedian like Matthau." Lemmon also said that he sensed a change in the director's approach to filmmaking. "Billy seemed more tense. He seemed to be pushing harder, forcing it ... It was something I couldn't put my finger on exactly. He had always been open to suggestions I had for my part ... but this time, I didn't feel as welcome with my ideas, so I didn't say anything. Who am I to tell Billy Wilder what he should do?" The film was a critical and commercial failure, and in later years Klaus Kinski even denied being in it. "The best thing for me about Buddy Buddy was that not very many people saw it," Wilder said: "It hurts to strike out on your last picture." Eager to bounce back from the unhappy experience, he and Diamond immediately went to work writing what they hoped would be their next project. "Iz and I had so many ideas, we'd work on one for four weeks, and then we'd start another. We'd been burned; we chose wrong with Buddy Buddy, and we didn't want to make another mistake. We'd had some failures, so our confidence wasn't as good." Although Wilder and Diamond had developed several ideas for another film, none of them came to fruition, leaving Buddy Buddy as their last collaboration and Wilder's final directorial effort. ==Reception==

Critical reception Reviews of Buddy Buddy were mixed-to-negative, with only a few mainstream critics liking the film, one of them being Vincent Canby of The New York Times. Calling it "slight but irresistible", Canby observed that it "doesn't compare with the greatest Wilder-Diamond films, including The Fortune Cookie, which launched Mr. Lemmon and Mr. Matthau as a team, but it is the lightest, breeziest comedy any one of them has been associated with in years." He added, "There's something most appealing about the simplicity of the physical production and the small cast. I suspect that one of the reasons Buddy Buddy is so congenial, even when a gag doesn't build to the anticipated boff, is because you never feel intimidated by it. It doesn't attempt to overwhelm you with the kind of gigantic sets, props and crowd scenes that made farces on the order of 1941 and The Blues Brothers so oppressive. Buddy Buddy travels light, unencumbered by expensive special effects, fueled only by the talents of its actors and its director's irrepressible sense of the ridiculous." He said of Lemmon, "Not in a long time has [he] been more appealing", and he described Matthau as "extremely comic – perhaps our best farceur". Far less enthusiastic was Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who stated, "This movie is appalling. It made me want to rub my eyes. Was it possible that the great Billy Wilder ... could possibly have made a film this bad? Buddy Buddy is very bad. It is a comedy without any laughs. (And, yes, I mean literally that it contains no laughs.) But it is worse than that. It succeeds in reducing two of the most charming actors in American motion picture history to unlikable ciphers. Can you imagine a film that co-stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon and yet contains no charm, ebullience, wit, charisma – even friendliness? This whole movie is like one of those pathetic Hollywood monsters drained of its life fluids ... Basically, we are invited to watch two drudges meander through a witless, pointless exercise in farce ... Buddy Buddy is incompetent. And that is the saddest word I can think of to describe it." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune named it as the worst film of 1981 (Roger Ebert disliked the film as much as Siskel did, but his pick for 1981's worst film was ''Heaven's Gate''). Channel 4 said, "Wilder helming the classic comic pairing of Matthau and Lemmon is always going to be difficult to dismiss, but it has to be said that all involved had seen better days at the time this got made ... There's the recognizable chemistry between the two leads, but little else here to recommend. It would be foolish to come to this movie expecting The Odd Couple or The Apartment, but you do expect something a little better than this." Wilder later reflected, "In this Donner Pass expedition known as Hollywood, many fall by the wayside. People eat people. Very few make it. Lately I've been going to more funerals than openings of pictures. Sometimes you have a funeral and an opening on the same day, and you don't feel very good when you see a comedy after you've put somebody to rest or watched the Neptune Society blow his ashes into the Pacific Ocean ... Sometimes I feel the way you feel when you find yourself at a dinner party with an uncongenial group of people and you say, 'I've got a great story, but I'm not going to tell it to them tonight. I'm not interested in entertaining them.' A lot of energy goes into it, and sometimes it doesn't seem as if it's worth the trouble. I've been doing it now for over 50 years." and eventually grossed $7.3 million in North America. == See also ==