AWARDS & HONORS

As awards season started, Walter Matthau was the big winner of The Fortune Cookie, with a Golden Globe nomination, a Golden Laurel from Motion Picture Exhibitor Magazine and the Kansas City Film Critics Award.

The screenplay was nominated for an award from the Writers Guild.

The Fortune Cookie received Oscar® nominations for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Screenplay. The movie won for Matthau's supporting performance.

Matthau was the only actor present to accept his Oscar® that year. He had his arm in a cast at the time, the result of a fall from his bicycle while riding on the Pacific Coast Highway.

In the early '70s, Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber polled readers and industry members to name the best films and performances of the '60s in a variety of categories. For Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy, industry members voted Walter Matthau's performance the second-best of the decade (behind Hugh Griffith in Tom Jones, 1963), while readers voted it the best.

The Critics' Corner: THE FORTUNE COOKIE

"Billy Wilder is a cranky, perhaps even dangerous, man. That is, he is an unregenerate moralist whose latest vision of the American Dream, titled The Fortune Cookie, is a fine, dark, gag-filled hallucination, peopled by dropouts from the Great Society."
- Vincent Canby, The New York Times

"The old Billy Wilder is back with The Fortune Cookie and a case of grand and glorious larceny committed by Walter Matthau, who walks away with everything in sight and sound."
- Judith Crist, The New York World Journal Telegram

"Actor Matthau is leering, sneering, sniggering, swaggering, popping his optics, slopping his chops and generally behaving like the Nero of the Nuisance Claims Division."
- Time Magazine

"Lemmon shows how funny and touching a skilled comedian can be within the physical confines of a neck brace and an electric wheelchair. He also shows how generous an actor can be, for he must have known that the script gave the best of everything to Matthau, whose performance is a wonder."
- Joseph Morgenstern, Newsweek

"Technically, Lemmon does a superb job in the main role, but he just naturally exudes too much intelligence to be totally believable as the easily led TV cameraman. The picture really belongs to Matthau, who is rapidly becoming the W.C. Fields of the Sixties."
- Richard Schickel, Life

"Whiplash Willie, as incarnated by Matthau's dyspeptic frog's countenance, has a crocodile's eye for the main chance, the patience of a leech and a bite like a bear trap when an insurance company crosses his tracks. He is droopy but Snoopy, limp but alert -- he makes the usual ambulance-chasing lawyers look as if their brains are in their feet. Whiplash lets nothing come between him and the insurance men's money, except the settlement cheque."
- Alexander Walker, Evening Standard

"Generally amusing (often wildly so) but overlong, the pic is pegged on an insurance fraud...


"A sour, visually ugly comedy...which gets worse as it goes along - more cynical and more sanctimonious...Walter Matthau (the only possible reason for seeing the picture) is...Lemmon's venomous, shyster-lawyer brother-in-law.."
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"On the surface it's a complete delight, with Matthau's relentlessly funny lines taking most of the honours, but underneath lies a disenchantment as bleak as The Apartment [1960]: amoral, misogynist characters (in Lemmon's case, literally spineless) racing through ever more futile efforts to outmanoeuvre each other. The friction between the laughs and the cynicism generates more heat than most Hollywood comedies even aim at, including Wilder's later The Front Page [1974] with the same stars."
- Tony Rayns, TimeOut Film Guide

"Billy Wilder exercises his cynical tendencies in this scandalously neglected comedy...this is definitely Walter Matthau's show. His malleable facial features work overtime as he grows increasingly determined to get his treasured cut of the money cake. It's a real tour-de-force and an example to any aspiring comic actor. One must say, alas, that the Wilder-I.A.L Diamond script does occasionally lapse into redundant schmaltz. However, for the overwhelming part it is disciplined and acutely funny."
- Stephen Townsend, Edinburgh University Film Society

"Flat, stretched-out, only occasionally effective comedy which relies too much on mordant attitudes and a single star performance."
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide

"Matthau's conniving, coldhearted performance is the reason to watch this otherwise unfunny Billy Wilder comedy...This is the first of the Wilder films that had Matthau's character aggravating Lemmon's, but Lemmon is so restricted in movement that he can't properly express his aggravation."
- Danny Peary, Guide For the Film Fanatic

Compiled by Frank Miller