7pm PST – Prisoner of Second Avenue, The (1975) – A suddenly unemployed executive and his understanding wife must adapt to their new life. Cast: Jack Lemmon, Elizabeth Wilson, Anne Bancroft, Gene Saks Dir: Melvin Frank BW-98 mins, TV-PG
TCM’s Star of the Month is the irreplaceable Jack Lemmon, who died in 2001, and I’m still not over it.
“The Prisoner of Second Avenue” ranks among Neil Simon’s finest works thanks to his dynamite script, Lemmon’s central performance played perfectly on a knife edge of comedy and tragedy, the marvelous Anne Bancroft as his understanding wife, and Manhattan in the mid 70s, when the city was a vibrant character all on its own.
Lemmon plays Mel Edison, a high strung, middle-executive worker bee who has an emotional collapse after being fired from his job and subsequently punished by all things New York. While much of the film is played for laughs, its genius is in how desperately sad Mel’s situation is as his wife is forced back to work so he can aimlessly roam the city between psychiatric appointments and wars of will with his neighbors, one memorably involving a snow shovel.
Watching the likes of Lemmon and Bancroft at work compared to what’s on the screen today makes me about as grateful for DVD and TCM as one can be.
Tomorrow night you can also catch Lemmon in the warm and funny “Grumpy Old Men,” co-starring his best friend and frequent screen partner Walter Matthau, “The China Syndrome,” one of those great liberal films made when liberals knew how to make great liberal films, and “Save The Tiger,” the character study of a desperate man which won Lemmon his long overdue Oscar for Best Actor.
One of a kind.
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