Walter Matthau was the most human of all the actors who ever became unlikely film stars. Just think of that wrinkled lunch-sack of a face, the heavily creased forehead, the big bulbous nose, the shrewd little brown eyes peering out of from unlovely flesh bags, and the sardonic slot of a mouth drawn down at the ends by heavy hound-dog jowls. It was a face that exuded a manifest sense of fallibility. It was, as Matthau himself observed, notably unhandsome. He once said that he was probably cast in his first movie role, the whip-wielding villain in The Kentuckian (1955), because he offered “no competition in the looks department” to the film’s producer and star, male beauty Burt Lancaster. 

Indeed, his star image came from his ability to represent flawed humanity exaggerated to comical extremes. Think of his portrayal of notable slob Oscar Madison in the film version of The Odd Couple (1968), or cranky alcoholic Morris Buttermaker in The Bad News Bears (1976). These are men who wear their bad habits like tarnished, dented badges of honor.

Yet that face was also capable of breaking into a heartening smile, broad and unexpectedly beaming. That generally slouching, shambling figure was actually six foot three and surprisingly athletic, capable of finely controlled posture.

As actor Julie Harris reports, when Matthau was mentioned as possible casting opposite her in the play A Shot in the Dark (1961), as a suave, well-dressed British toff, she protested, “Walter Matthau? He’s so rough and funny and uncultured-looking…” But he brought it off in fine style. As Neil Simon reported after watching the show, he appeared to be “the most dapper, debonair leading man I ever saw….He knew what the posture was there.”

Although his great era was the late 1960s through the 1970s, in his early career, Matthau still had an occasional brush with “romantic role” status, such as his supporting role as the rival love interest for Patricia Neal in A Face in the Crowd (1957). He plays a wry, bespectacled intellectual who radiates decency, and spots early on that TV star and man of the people “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith) is acquiring alarming neo-fascist levels of power over the public. You can also watch on YouTube the tape of Matthau’s auditioning for the lead opposite Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (1955), which ultimately went to Tom Ewell. 

Even in his many early villain roles, he demonstrated his range and appeal. In his scenes with Audrey Hepburn in Charade (1963), for example, Matthau is remarkably funny and charming as he pretends to be a CIA administrator at the American Embassy in Paris trying to warn her against the dangerous criminals she’s dealing with (he’s actually the most dangerous of all of them). As he briefs her, she keeps asking him for cigarettes, ripping off the filters, smoking one or two puffs, absent-mindedly putting them out and taking another one, until he finally exclaims in appalled tones, “Do you know how much those things cost?”

Perhaps to compensate for his hangdog looks, Matthau was gifted with immense charisma and sheer colorful likability. No actor was ever able to form a more immediate bond of trust and affection with an audience than Matthau in comedy. This is even thematized in the vibrant Hopscotch (1974), which has Matthau playing a savvy, irreverent spy named Miles Kendig who goes rogue, writing his incendiary memoirs on the run and mailing chapters to the press. Though he is threatening to take the CIA brass down with him, several fellow agents have to admit, sometimes in tones of bemusement as he outwits and humiliates them, how much they like the guy. “One cannot help it,” says his Soviet counterpoint played by Herbert Lom. Hopscotch also verifies Matthau’s rumpled appeal by pairing him in an opposites-attract romance with Glenda Jackson. With her elegant, sharply cut cheekbones and ironic, upper-class severity, she plays an ex-spy and ex-lover who reunites with Kendig to help him expose and undercut the CIA and live to tell about it.

Matthau had a streetwise Everyman intelligence that animated his whole being on film. It’s a pleasure to watch him think on camera, because every smirk, glower, and grimace confides in us his assessment of his faulty fellow human beings and the rough world we all share. He can do it when he’s got all the funny lines and business, and he can do it equally well when playing the straight man. Just watch his Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple, sitting in a restaurant across a table from Jack Lemmon’s Felix Unger. As Felix tries to clear his sinuses with a long series of mortifying “MMMWAH!” sounds, all the other diners stare, aghast. Lemmon comes up with admirable honks, but it’s Matthau’s frozen puss as he tries to downplay his embarrassment and make normalizing conversation that makes it hilarious: “So did that, uh, did that clear it…?”

Matthau held ordinary, everyday, crass, irritable, impatient selfishness in tension with a kindly, humorous, empathizing core. This core, buried somewhere underneath, is so small it takes a lot of concentrated digging to find it. Matthau’s characters often get partially redeemed—but not too redeemed. That’s important. We’d never want to see a truly virtuous Walter Matthau. Indeed, we can’t imagine it.

Matthau’s ability to push the apparent irredeemability of his characters was on full display in Elaine May’s brilliant and underrated comedy A New Leaf (1972). Matthau stars as rich snob Henry Grahame, who loses all his money and suddenly desperately needs a rich wife, one whom he plans to murder shortly after the honeymoon.

Especially with thin, doe-eyed Elaine May playing the hapless, maddening, trusting sacrificial lamb, Henrietta, it was the ultimate test of whether Matthau could be likable no matter what. It’s as if he was muttering to the audience, “Okay, here I’m playing a wealthy bastard who went to all the right schools and dresses in bespoke-tailor-made suits and knows about fine wines and garbage like that, which goes against my whole star persona, a rumpled, big-nosed, baggy-faced, cynical, working-class Lower East Side mensch. Just go with it.” And as the audience, we end up saying enthusiastically, “Carry on, Walter!” We stick with him, even as Grahame begins the process of committing passive murder by letting Henrietta drown into a river. But having reluctantly come to value her, at the last moment he rushes back to perform a rescue, shouting all the while, “Damn, damn, damn, you work, you plan, nothing ever turns out the way you want it!”

Matthau’s hard-won confidence was essential to his career success and his star image. With his offbeat looks and talent for playing wide-ranging roles, film industry insiders tended to imagine him as a successful supporting player. Yet Matthau did not see himself that way. While he was playing a detective in the Charade-like comedy-thriller, Mirage (1965), the film’s director, Edward Dmytryk, was overwhelmed with admiration for Matthau’s gifts, raving, “He did things that I didn’t even realize were in the damn script.” He gushed to Matthau, “Walter, you’re going to become the greatest character actor in the business.” Matthau replied, “I’m not gonna be a character actor, I’m gonna be a leading man.”

But it was a long journey to Hollywood stardom. “All it takes to succeed in Hollywood is forty good breaks,” Matthau once wisecracked, and it must’ve seemed hardly an exaggeration, after he spent decades kicking around on stage and in films and television. 

He’d come up the hard way, in the once notorious slums of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, as the son of an impoverished Ukrainian-Jewish peddler Morris Mathow and Lithuanian-Jewish garment worker Rose Barolsky. In the documentary Walter Matthau: Diamond in the Rough, the actor said he never remembered his father living at home, which meant from early childhood on, he was scrounging for money to help his mother, who was supporting them working in sweatshops, “sewing ladies’ rayon underwear.”

Matthau’s mother was, as he put it, so warped by a life of grinding poverty, “such a nay-sayer, such a dour, sullen, bitter, disappointed person,” that he based on her his performance as the impossibly glum, cranky, and pessimistic washed-up vaudevillian Willy Clark in The Sunshine Boys (1975).

He was bitten early by the theater bug. He regarded the theater as a means of transport to a realm of “great drama, beauty, and interest” that was key to his personal survival, and found any way he could to be part of it. He started off selling cherry drinks outside the local Yiddish theater, and eventually got cast in occasional small roles, at the rate of one spoken line equaling fifty cents per performance. Matthau’s memories of precise amounts of money earned are evidence of a youth mired in serious poverty. He said, “I developed powers of imagination because I couldn’t stand the harsh reality and the cold-water flat and my mother constantly being unhappy.”  

His actor friend Ossie Davis, struggling to make it in the theater alongside Matthau, called him “a dedicated growler who used humor to fend off the world.”

As a young man he got sidetracked by monetary necessity into a stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps, cutting trees and fighting fires (“I was an axe man”). That earned him a dollar a day and allowed him to send more money home. The bombing of Pearl Harbor led to his active service as an Army radio operator. Eventually after the war ended, he wound his itinerate way back to The New School in New York City, taking acting classes under Erwin Piscator. After that he was soon making his mark as a character actor on stage and in live television, working his way up over several years to leading roles in comedies like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955) and A Shot in the Dark (1961).

He went back and forth to Hollywood frequently, and claimed to regard it with a cynical eye: “Hollywood is a peculiar place. I’d go out to do a picture and pick up some money, then go back to New York and pay my bills…and do real acting on the stage.”

What finally put Matthau across as a star was a one-two punch of stage and screen successes: the huge hit play The Odd Couple (1965), later adapted to the screen with Matthau and Jack Lemmon, and his hilarious turn as shyster lawyer William H. “Whiplash Willie” Gringrich in The Fortune Cookie (1966). That turned out to be a combination of the right role with the right director (Billy Wilder) and the right co-star (Lemmon). Always shrewd about career advancement, Matthau knew he’d found a true star-making opportunity, telling Jack Lemmon on the set, “You know, you don’t have the best part in this picture—I have it.”

Unfazed, Lemmon replied, “It’s about time, don’t you think, Slick?”

The opening shot of the film introduces Matthau as Gingrich with his back to the camera, enveloped in a cloud of cigar smoke so heavy you can almost smell the noxious fumes. Matthau stands hunched in a heavy overcoat like a human vulture, waiting for some unwary prey to present itself. Accompanied by an explanatory subtitle – “The Brother-in-law” – the moment constitutes such a total characterization, it generates laughs on its own.

Consider Morris Buttermaker, Matthau’s character in The Bad News Bears from 1976, a wonderfully tough-minded satire of the world of kids’ sports that’s also a heartwarming comedy. Buttermaker is an alcoholic former minor-league baseball pitcher who now cleans pools for a living. For a few extra bucks, slipped to him under the table by a sports-obsessed dad, he’s agreed to coach a little league team made up of unathletic losers-at-life kids. 

After introducing the world of little league as being dominated by mean ex-jock coaches fixated on winning like Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), the film gives us Buttermaker, who comes rolling up the street in a big beat-up convertible Cadillac that would’ve been a long, sleek, cool car twenty years earlier. The trunk lid is gone and his pool-cleaning equipment is hanging out. Clearly he’s been on the skids for quite a while. He parks and immediately reaches into the back seat to open the cooler, get a beer, and crack it open. Then he takes a small bottle of Jim Beam out of the glove compartment and spikes his beer with it. 

What we’re seeing is not just the basics of a regular working-class alcoholic routine, we’re also seeing that Butter has a certain irreverent flair, an indifference to public opinion, that we like. He confirms this when puts a cigarillo into a cigarette holder—an oddly sophisticated smoke—and starts hunting for a light.

A young, small, tough-looking kid on a motorcycle has been watching him through aviator shades. His hand comes into frame with a silver Zippo lighter, and lights Buttermaker’s cigarillo for him. “Thanks, Mister,” says Buttermaker, and Kelly Leak (played by young genius Jackie Earle Haley) roars off on his motorcycle. 

Kelly is twelve going on thirty and is a cynical hard case, known to his fellow pre-teens as a “bad muthah.” He’s also a fine athlete, who will eventually be persuaded to join the Bears. Buttermaker calling him “mister” conveys both ironic humor about his prematurely adult manner, and recognition that the kid’s got impressive style. It also indicates that Buttermaker may be down-and-out, but he’s perceptive, and can size people up quickly. It’s probably why he drinks.

The kids, who are intelligently cynical about the adults in their milieu, perceive Buttermaker’s humanity at once. They like him immediately, even while calling him “Buttercrud” and “Boilermaker” and other disrespectful nicknames. And of course, Buttermaker winds up getting emotionally involved in the kids’ humiliation at being the worst team in the league, and actually teaching them some baseball skills. 

Brainy in an underhanded way typical of Matthau characters, Buttermaker finds the corner-cutting means to get an edge over the other teams, especially the one in first place, coached by despicably macho Roy Turner. Buttermaker drafts Amanda Wurlitzer (Tatum O’Neal), an ace pitcher he trained himself in the art of the curveball, “the most tantalizing knuckler you ever saw in your life.” This happened when she was nine and he was dating her mother, a relationship that didn’t end well: 

“I guess I handled it badly,” says Buttermaker. 

“You handled it like shit,” says Amanda. 

She in turn persuades Kelly Leak to join the team after losing a bet that requires she accompany him to a Rolling Stones concert. Buttermaker is appalled: 

“Eleven-year-old girls don’t go out on dates!” 

“’Course they do, where you been?...I know an eleven-year-old girl who’s already on the pill!” 

“Don’t you ever say that word again!” 

“Who do you think you are?” 

“I’m your manager.”

Transforming the Bears into a winning team headed for the championship, however, also reignites Buttermaker’s long-dead ambition to win and “show those bastards.” He gets uncomfortably close to being an abusive sumbitch like Roy Turner before Turner himself goes so far over the line in the final game, storming out to the pitcher’s mound to slap his son for disobeying an order, that Buttermaker recovers his inner mensch. 

It costs the Bears the game and the championship, but it gets them a more glorious ending. Roy Turner’s team, the Yankees, hoisting up their monstrously large trophy, offer the Bears a condescending apology and acknowledge that, though they’re still not a very good team, they’ve “got guts.” 

The Bears, awarded a tiny second-place trophy, aren’t having it. The smallest, fightingest kid, having absorbed the best of Buttermaker’s irreverent moxie, yells, “Hey Yankees! You can take your apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass!”  

Central to Walter Matthau’s appeal was his ability to convey the typical make-up of an adult human being in the Western world: a few bright, inspiring glimmers of unintended, highly inconvenient virtue amidst the dross of crappy, carping, self-centered, untrusting, anti-social misanthropy. After all, that perspective doesn’t emerge from nowhere, it’s forged in hard experience. Matthau’s usual hunched posture and shambling walk that resisted conforming to the classic romantic stance perfectly represented the experience of modern urban humanity, casual yet intensely wary, knowing life is a mess not worth dressing up for. A place where you never know what fresh hell is going to hit you next. 

It's perhaps this insistently unvirtuous quality that makes Matthau so compelling a film star to consider at this point in our cultural history. It is a time when one might be pardoned for thinking, “Oh, be a human,” in response to so much of the prim self-righteousness starching the dominant discourse. That Matthau is so refreshing to look upon now is due to our perverse state of denial, our insistence on virtue as a readily attained state of being, and our harsh condemnation of the errant. Sarcastic, slovenly, and defined by his vices, Walter Matthau could be considered practically a neo-countercultural patron saint of everyone who’s sick to death of virtue-signaling, humble-bragging, and wellness-industry preaching.