Movies: Walter Matthau

Gangster and cop killer Jack Martin is on the run from the law, and hides out in a small town. Low on funds, he engineers a clever bank robbery that yields him a big bundle. Now he has not only the cops and the FBI after him, but also the local crime...

A friendly, successful suburban teacher and father grows dangerously addicted to cortisone, resulting in his transformation into a household despot....

Lewis and Clark, aka The Sunshine Boys, were famous comedians during the vaudeville era, but off-stage they couldn't stand each other and haven't spoken in over 20 years of retirement. Willy Clark's nephew is the producer of a TV variety show that wa...

A film about the life and work of the master comedy filmmaker, Charles Chaplin....

Grandmother has nothing to say when Libby tells her that she is off to LA to look up Dad, a Hollywood screenwriter. Grandmother has been in a New York cemetery for six years and Dad has been out of Libby's life for 16 of her 19 years. Libby arrives i...

Film critic J. Hoberman discusses the best-selling 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler on which "Fail-Safe" is based, along with the pervasiveness of nuclear paranoia in films of the sixties....

A fun-loving bachelor woos and weds a secretary, but the bonds of this marriage aren't strong enough to stop his philandering from continuing....

Studio head Joe Mulholland promises his dying producer and mentor, Saul Gritz, to adapt a popular sex manual into a film, despite his better judgment. Unable to figure out how to turn the nonfiction book into a narrative movie, Mulholland enlists the...

A profile of writer-director Billy Wilder...

Documentary featuring interviews with director Sidney Lumet, "Fail-Safe" (2000) producer George Clooney, star Dan O’Herlihy and screenwriter Walter Bernstein....

Con artist Steve Blair persuades Tony Dallas, a Manhattan gangster, to finance a movie about Adam and Eve by offering the female lead to Tony's stripper girl friend, Cha Cha Miller. The film is such a disaster, however, that Steve and his writer, Pau...

Two plays by William Saroyan portraying writers stymied, inspired, frustrated, excited, listful, wistful, slothful, awed, unnerved, perhaps corrupted and perplexed by the promise and let-down writing holds for them....

A chronicle of the 1975 International Press Conclave hosted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer over two days in May 1975....

A lawyer begins to win after his wife secretly becomes his bookie to save their money....

Modern comedians share their thoughts about Laurel and Hardy. Also includes archival footage of contemporary comedians. Hosted by Dom DeLuise....

After robbing a bank Murphy assumes the identity of his pursuer, a famous US Marshal, when he stumbles into a town and is confronted by the local judge, Matthau. Murphy is forced to remain as the new Marshal; an old flame, Scala, nearly unmasks him b...

An all-star variety special saluting America....

A bored housewife poses as a call girl for a movie star sex-symbol, hoping she can prove to her husband, the star's agent, that she is still desirable to other men and thereby, rekindle the spark in their marriage....

Small town lawyer, Harmon Cobb, defends a Nazi prisoner of war against murder charges. Set during World War II, Cobb has to contend with the difficulties of defending the devil when the town's only doctor (Barnard Hughes) dies while at "Camp Bremen" ...

French film critic Michel Ciment interviews Billy Wilder about his life and filmmaking....