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Sony has announced the long overdue Jack Lemmon Film Collection for release on June 9th. The titles are Phffft (1954), Operation Mad Ball (1957), The Notorious Landlady (1962), Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963) and Good Neighbor Sam (1964). The six disc set also includes a bonus disc with undisclosed contents. No word on other bonus features either.

Titles will not be sold separately. Retail will be $59.98

Has anyone seen any of these? I'm pretty excited about the fact that I haven't seen a single one.

I'm looking forward to the pair of (unseen by me) Richard Quine films in the set. I've really enjoyed several of his other sex comedies and was just the other day noting how much of his work hasn't been released on DVD.

"Notorious Landlady" is co-written by Blake Edwards (I think he learned from/wrote for Quine?)

Not to get off-topic, but re: Quine/Domino:

Have you (has anyone) seen Quine's "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You In The Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad"? Just a baffling/suicidal title for a movie and the summary sounds quite bizarre.

That's the Rosalind Russell movie, right? Haven't seen it, but no film could ever live up to a title like that.

I came across this quote from Jack Lemmon today in Peter Bogdanovich's Pieces of Time:

"Some of the Columbia pictures were damned good, but I think what screwed them up were the titles. No, really, titles are important. Look at the ones I've been stuck with: It Should Happen to You, You Can't Run Away From It, Phffft. When we were shooting Phffft, they stopped production right in the middle of the day so they could discuss the title. Everyone waited while they went into a two-and-a-half hour huddle upstairs. When they broke, I asked the director about it, and he said they'd decided to take out one 'f.'"

domino harvey wrote:I came across this quote from Jack Lemmon today in Peter Bogdanovich's Pieces of Time:

"... When we were shooting Phffft, they stopped production right in the middle of the day so they could discuss the title. Everyone waited while they went into a two-and-a-half hour huddle upstairs. When they broke, I asked the director about it, and he said they'd decided to take out one 'f.'"

Wow. Funny thing is, the title is what made me DVR Phffft a couple months ago on TCM (only to lose it to a DVR crash before getting to see it).

Extras on the sixth disc:
* Two-part Documentary
* The Ford Television Theatre’s “Marriageable Male” episode

Zumpano wrote:

domino harvey wrote:I came across this quote from Jack Lemmon today in Peter Bogdanovich's Pieces of Time:

"... When we were shooting Phffft, they stopped production right in the middle of the day so they could discuss the title. Everyone waited while they went into a two-and-a-half hour huddle upstairs. When they broke, I asked the director about it, and he said they'd decided to take out one 'f.'"

Wow. Funny thing is, the title is what made me DVR Phffft a couple months ago on TCM (only to lose it to a DVR crash before getting to see it).

Lucky dog. I'm only one film in and already I'm ready to bail on this set. Phffft! is a dead on arrival sex farce with maybe five jokes stretched out to fit an hour and a half. Thank God for Kim Novak, who shows up an hour in to stop the audience from falling asleep with her half-assed but in stark contrast actually amusing performance. Think about that for a second: the best thing in the film is Kim Novak. Need I go on?

Woof. Sounds like my DVR was a time-saver once again. Perhaps "Operation Mad Ball" has a(n early) Blake Edwards script going for it? (I'm not trying to submit you to torture Domino, but since you bought the set... )

domino harvey wrote:Think about that for a second: the best thing in the film is Kim Novak. Need I go on?

Only if you're not trying to say that the best thing in any Kim Novak film is Kim Novak, and that Kim Novak is a very great thing indeed.

Zumpano wrote: Perhaps "Operation Mad Ball" has a(n early) Blake Edwards script going for it?

Not so much. Though Operation Mad Ball thankfully picks up steam as it careens towards the wildly chaotic finales Quine is so fond of, the film is the second in a row to be utterly devoid of laughs. I don't even remember smiling. Quine does his best to make everything seem funny, which contributes to the film being a generally likable failure-- but it's still pretty rotten.

Ha! Sorry the box was a bit of a bust for you Domino. I feel like I should throw you a couple bucks for your troubles and my egging you on in this thread. Your time wasted has saved me some time. Perhaps I can return the favor someday.

Well, there's still three more films left to go. If at least one of them knocks it out of the park, it won't be a lost cause. But the box has already gone 0-2 right out of the gate and I'm not huge on miracles

Are there english subtitles (not closed caption but subtitles) on this box-set?

Finally made it through another title in this set, the Notorious Landlady, and pretty much you could just C+P my comments for the other Quine title: Great typical Quine-styled chaotic finale that fails to make up for the awful 115 minutes that preceded it. (Why did he not impose himself anywhere else but the finales of these films?) Fred Astaire was amusing for a spell during the film's first half just by virtue of being Fred Astaire, but then he turns into Jack Lemmon and we already had one of those in this pic to no great success. Ugh, I think I've solved the mystery of how no one else has exactly been chiming in on this set: I bought the only one. Though let me double sales: Yes, there are subtitles

My long national nightmare is over: I have finished the last two films in this boxed set of the damned. Both Under the Yum Yum Tree and Good Neighbor Sam resemble bawdy sitcoms, but at least Yum Yum has the decency to be genuinely indecent. Here's a sex comedy for the whole family whose frothy third act hinges on whether a date rape occurred! Lemmon plays an oversexed lech of a landlord who goes around dispensing manipulative advice in order to bed his new tenant. This is the only film in the set to make me laugh, and though it's still not a particularly good film, that's something more than I can say for its brethren. Also it features a finish that has to be seen to be believed, but since no one is going to ever see this thing, let me tell you that the film suggests that Paul Lynde's henpecked handyman character was really an oversexed shapeshifting house-cat. No, really.

As for Good Neighbor Sam, it has a good first ten minutes, with a catchy title sequence and a good sight gag about sheep, but then it get bogged down in a needlessly complicated mistaken identity storyline that becomes more and more annoying as the film progresses. The film's attempts at farce are totally undermined by the Lemmon character's wishywashy goodness, as the audience never believes for a second that he'd bed down with Romy Schneider, despite the fact that doing so would have provided actual instead of manufactured conflict and had a fighting chance at producing comedy. Instead we get a tone-deaf finish in which every single potential conflict the film has taken great pains to set up during its interminable two-hour-plus running time is completely forgotten and no narrative resolution occurs.

This is among the worst sets of films ever released by a reputable studio under a star's moniker. Out of all the films that needed saving, how did these get the lifeboat from Sony?

On November 2, Sony will release the individual discs of films from Jack Lemmon Film Collection for 14.94 list price each.