If you're up for watching a classic Billy Wilder comedy today before Super Bowl kick-off, I've got a recommendation for you. It's Billy Wilder's 1966 comedy, THE FORTUNE COOKIE, starring Jack Lemmon as a CBS TV cameraman slightly injured while shooting a football game, Walter Matthau as the shady lawyer who gets involved with the cameraman's injury and Ron Rich as the NFL player who accidentally tackled the cameraman.
I grew up in South Central Los Angeles during the 60s. Our family lived in the curfew area during the Watts Riots, as national news tagged the uprising, in that same decade. By then, even though I was very young, I was already a Jack Lemmon fan thanks to his movies being shown on TV. Mom and Dad let me have a Saturday afternoon at the movies one weekend. I saw THE FORTUNE COOKIE on the big screen and loved it. I noticed a racial thread that ran through the movie. As I grew up and got older, I loved the movie even more because of that thread. I call THE FORTUNE COOKIE "Wilder's Civil Rights era comedy." In the 1960s, Wilder had an almost subliminal way of blending in a much-needed diversity into his films. Look at 1960's THE APARTMENT. In the wide shots of the floor C.C. Baxter (played by Lemmon) worked on at a top insurance company in Manhattan, notice the number of Black employees in the shot, working and wearing business attire. In the famous Christmas party scene, notice the Black employees also participating in the office party merriment. Now...compare that to a Fox film which has many scenes that take place on the floor of a Manhattan publishing company. The movie is 1959's THE BEST OF EVERYTHING. Notice the lack of Black employees in the large secretarial pool. Here's a short clip of the office Christmas party scene from THE APARTMENT.
In THE FORTUNE COOKIE, the NFL star is called Luther "Boom Boom" Jackson. He's a dapper, charming, polite man. A friendship forms between him and the injured cameraman. As that friendship develops in Cleveland, we see and hear racial stereotypes come out of the mouths of folks in the cameraman's story. His greedy, lovely ex-wife enters the scene in cahoots with the shady lawyer. She sees Jackson and assumes he's a chauffeur, a hired driver. Some ugly, racist language will anger the cameraman into physical action. Racial images, stereotypes, prejudice and interracial unity are definitely in Wilder's comedy. This was in the 1960s, a racially turbulent decade in America -- the decade of the Civil Rights movement.
Billy Wilder's THE FORTUNE COOKIE was released three years after Dr. Martin Luther King's historic March of Washington, DC and two years before Dr. King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee.
I'm one of the freelance scriptwriters for TCM. I wrote Ben Mankiewicz's scripts for his intro and outro to THE FORTUNE COOKIE. He kept most of what I wrote but he replaced my section on the racial thread in the movie with other info.
In 1980, my first full year of working on television, I interviewed Jack Lemmon. I was a weekly movie reviewer on Milwaukee's ABC affiliate. Lemmon realized the homework I'd done for our interview session and told me to stick around a bit after the interview. He took me aside, complimented me on my research and told me to pursue other celebrity interview opportunities. He knew very few Black people, at that time, were seen on TV doing that kind of work. The advice he graciously gave me, advice which I followed, changed the course of my career.
We took a photo together. I had it framed. I treasure it. What a wonderful experience that was. What a wonderful actor Jack Lemmon was. Check out THE FORTUNE COOKIE.
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