The chief chiselers are Walter Matthau, an ambulance-chasing legal eagle, and Jack Lemmon, his schnook brother-in-law, a television cameraman whom Matthau entices into an elaborate, $1-million insurance swindle after Lemmon is slightly roughed up whileĬovering a Cleveland Browns football game. It is also an explosively funny live-actionĬartoon about petty chiselers who regard the economic system as a giant pinball machine, ready to pay off to anyone who tilts its properly. Wilder's last film and a comedy of unrelieved vulgarity, but it has style and taste. "The Fortune Cookie" is no more sunny-and, if possible, even less romantic-than "Kiss Me, Stupid," Mr. It arrived here yesterday at the Astor, Trans-Lux East and Murray Hill Theaters. "The Fortune Cookie," is a fine, dark, gag-filled hallucination, people by dropouts from the Great Society. That is, he is an unregenerate moralist whose latest version of the American Dream, titled
Illy Wilder is a cranky, perhaps even dangerous, man. 'The Fortune Cookie,' Funny Fantasy of Chiselers, Begins Its Run By VINCENT CANBY 'The Fortune Cookie,' Funny Fantasy of Chiselers, Begins Its Run