Snowthy, you’ll appreciate this.
Before they paired up in The Odd Couple, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau starred in “The Fortune Cookie”.
Lemmon was a mild-mannered tv cameraman who gets tackled covering a football game.
Matthau was a money-grubbing lawyer hoping to turn the injury into a million dollar payoff.
Even back in 1967 frivolous lawsuits were tying up the courts.
But the chemistry between the two was already flowering.
They did work very well together in whatever they appeared in as a duo, I agree with you there. As far as their take on the Odd Couple is concerned, they were great together, and Walter Matthau was really good as Oscar (then again, he was just perfectly suited for those kinds of curmudgeonly roles), but I didn't really care much for Jack Lemmons's Felix . . . yeah, he was neurotic, as Felix should be, but he also felt far more uptight, obnoxious, and pompous compared to Tony Randall's more impulsive, manic, and free-spirited (for the most part) Felix. Though, to be fair, that first season that was single-camera with only a laugh track, Felix and Oscar both felt far more restrictive and subdued compared to the other multi-camera live audience seasons, where they both were far more spontaneous and charismatic.
Speaking of which, I understand that both Tony Randall and Jack Klugman tested for their respective parts for the 1968 movie, which is amusing to think about it could've been a rare instance in show business where two movie actors actually reprise their starring roles on a TV show . . . back then, it just wasn't done, hence why all but Radar O'Reilly were recast with lesser-known actors when M*A*S*H was adapted from the movie to a TV show; movie actors were considered too big, too expensive, and too important to even lower themselves to TV work . . . nowadays, it seems like more and more once-prominent movie stars are doing not only TV work, but even internet work as well.