Jack Lemon is a TV cameraman photographing a football game in Cleveland. A runner, Ron Rich, is knocked out of bounds and propels Lemon into an obstacle. Lemon isn't hurt bad but is being checked out in the hospital when his brother-in-law, Walter Matthau, a shoddy personal negligence lawyer known as "Whiplash Willie," decides that Lemon should fake a partial paralysis so that the insurance company can be bilked. The ruse is elaborate. Every move the insurance investigators make is anticipated by the sedulous Matthau. "We know what they know, but they don't know we know." Ron Rich, the football player, is stricken with guilt at having injured someone. He spends all his time caring for the phony paralytic, neglects practice, and begins drinking. Lemon's wife, Judi West, has run away with a band leader but now, in anticipation of a juicy settlement, returns to him to share his good fortune. Lemon thinks it's love.

Most of the movie has Lemon trying desperately to fake his injury, while at the same time being ashamed of doing it. Matthau is grimly determine. Rich is pathos itself. West is slinkily feminine and wily.

The movie really belongs to Matthau. He's marvelous as the slimy lawyer. He works out of a cubicle in a huge building and treats his office the way he treated his apartment in "The Odd Couple." A shameless slob, before important visitors arrive he flings some dusty papers out of the way and empties a waste basket on the floor to offer them a seat, meanwhile cheerfully humming a tune from "The Barber of Seville". But Lemon is more than just a straight man. He burns with outrage and humiliation as Matthau coaches him through the performance.

The premise is great, and so are Matthau and Lemon, but the movie isn't as antic as some of Wilder's other comedies of the period -- "One, Two, Three" or "Some Like It Hot". It's closer in its intent to "The Apartment," an attempt at blending comedy and poignancy. Maybe in some ways it takes more skill to fuse the two than it does to stick to pure comedy. "Annie Hall", possibly Woody Allen's best movie, succeeded. And Howard Hawks' "Monkey Business" was a serious treatment of a disturbed marriage cloaked in farce.

"The Fortune Cookie," for all its jokes, doesn't quite cut it. It isn't that some of the jokes are dated, though they are. Well -- having brought up ludic obsolescence, I'll give an example. When Matthau discovers that Lemon's apartment is bugged and being photographed by investigators across the street, their eyes and ears open for any signs of fakery, he begins to play for his audience -- how terrible Lemon's plight is. It's like the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. An innocent young person walks through the woods and is attacked by a wolf pretending to be Grandma and so on -- the last line delivered with a portrait of Whistler's mother behind him. Lemon protests that he'd rather die than be paralyzed. "Better Red Riding Hood than Dead Riding Hood," replies Matthau. Kids, in 1966 we had this thing called "the Cold War." We were the good guys and the evildoers were the communists, or "Reds." There was a genuine threat of a nuclear holocaust, which some of us were willing to risk, and a few were eager for, because, as the expression went, "Better dead than Red." That's the slogan Matthau builds his joke on. Ha ha. Fortunately for everyone, the Cold War ended in 1989 and there has been world peace ever since. Alright. You may now return to your Gameboys.

I love the comic theme of Lemon's posturing and Matthau's reckless pursuit of a million dollars, but the melancholy story of Ron Rich's decline and Judi West's low-level cynicism don't really carry enough passion to grip us. Shirley McClaine's hopeless affair with the married phony Fred MacMurray in "The Apartment", though trite, was presented as genuine enough to make us care, but not enough to depress us. But here, Ron Rich's character is depressing and Judi West's is tiresome.

A good movie. I wish it had been better.