Walter Matthau's Gum Chewing in This Movie -- And In Charley Varrick From the Same Year

In 1973, Walter Matthau took a break from seven years of comedies to make two thrillers in a row: Charley Varrick which came out in the fall, and The Laughing Policeman which came out at Xmas (facing off against not only Dirty Harry in Magnum Force, but The Exorcist and The Sting, too. Tough competition.)

The first one out -- Charley Varrick -- was better than the second one(The Laughing Policeman.) Varrick was more tight, better plotted, and definitely more fun. Still, The Laughing Policeman was engaging on its own terms. Matthau got his usual good reviews, and it was good to have Matthau playing serious for awhile.

Having watched both movies recently, I noticed this: Matthau chewed gum in both movies. A LOT. Almost constantly. And there's a big difference in how he chews the gum, from movie to movie, and I think he did this ON PURPOSE. What an actor.

Charley Varrick: The gum chewing is low key, quick, and tied rather directly to Charley's superior thought proceses. He's a bank robber who accidentally robbed a Mafia bank and has a lot of their loot. The cops want to catch him(a cop died in the robbery.) The Mafia wants to kill him. His surviving bank robber pal is threatening him. And all the time, Charley just chews his gum and thinks. Sometimes he chews a little faster, sometimes a little longer. One time -- after his partner is yelling at him and threatening him -- Varrick chews his gum real fast and you REALIZE: Varrick has decided that this partner must die...but how?

The Laughing Policeman: The movie opens with an unknown killer machine gun massacring a small group of people on a late night SF bus. SF cop Matthau shows up to investigate -- and is devastated to see that one of the victims is his younger cop partner. Matthau goes to sit on a bench. He is joined by fellow cop Bruce Dern, who introduces himself as "the new partner."

Matthau chews gum in this scene with Dern too but -- unlike as when he played Charley Varrick -- Matthau's gum chewing is WAY overdone, sloppy. You can practically see the saliva spititng out of his mouth , and his chewing motions are so exaggerated -- up and down, up and down -- that you can see Matthau's jaw drop and his cheeks puff out. Finally(in this scene) Matthau spits the gum out...and then swallows it back in!

Matthau is communicating his out-of-control grief here. His partner is dead and Matthau may be responsible. He wants to rage...he may want to CRY. And Bruce Dern is in his face, nicely but too much. So Matthau sloppily chews away at his gum.

As The Laughing Policeman goes on, Matthau keeps chewing gum...never as sloppily as in that first scene with Dern but -- still and always more aggressively and sloppily than as in Charley Varrick.

The actor's craft.

PS. After doing these two back to back thrillers in 1973, Matthau's next film, in late 1974, was ALSO a thriller: The Taking of Pelham 123. These were "the Matthau thriller trilogy of the 70's." The Laughing Policeman is the least of them.