Walter Matthau in an X-Rated Movie?

Let's cut to the chase here: WALTER MATTHAU in an X-rated movie about a young woman who has sex with just about every man she encounters?

Walter Matthau?

The other major male movie stars in the movie made sense participating in such shenanigans -- Richard Burton(he of the torrid "Liz and Dick" love affair and marriage.) Check. James Coburn -- slightly ugly of face, but deeply sexy of sonorous voice, and the lady-killing "Our Man Flint" of spy spoof fame. Check. Marlon Brando -- whose tee-shirted sexual brute in "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the dawn of the 50s had launched a whole new era of sensitive open male sexuality, and who would go on in "Last Tango in Paris" to do some graphic sex scenes. Check.

Even Ringo Starr -- a goofy comedy fellow but part of the Fab Four about whom millions of young women sexually fantasized(and some acheived). Check.

But..Walter Matthau?

Each star gets an "episode" with the titular Candy(sexy little girlish Ewa Aulin) in Candy, and Matthau plays a miltary man. We can figure that maybe it was offered to George C. Scott first, maybe to Rod Steiger, but Matthau made "comedy sense." And "Candy" is a comedy. So it is that Matthau's -- general? captain? -- blusters and poses and speechifies like Buck Turgidson or George Patton...but when it gets down to the "sex scene"(and boy, do we fear it)...Matthau merely requests that Candy strip down for a peek. She does -- proud to do her patriotic chore. The comic results of this episode, sexually for Matthau, are..well, embarrassing.

What's interesting is that Walter Matthau DID have SOME sex appeal during his peak years of stardom. He called himself "the Ukranian Cary Grant." He got cast as a man two women could love in Cactus Flower(1969) -- both young Goldie Hawn and middle-aged Ingrid Bergman bed him(and one weds him.) He gets an off-screen sex scene with the beautiful Felicia Farr , and is shown in bed with her after, in Charley Varrick(1973.) In "A Guide for the Married Man"(1967) , he is married to gorgeous blonde Inger Stevens, who is ready for naked post-shower sex anytime.

So it wasn't THAT totally unexpected to see Walter Matthau in a movie about sex, except in those other movies, the subject was subtext, not context.

I suppose Matthau felt wrong in this role because he was surrounded by those other, younger, more virile looking sexy leading men. I suppose -- as so often in the career of Walter Matthau -- he surprised us with his star power, and proved he could hold his own as a sexy leading man.

Even here, in a bad movie, in an overplayed comedy role.