You know a movie has to be pretty good if it still produces great moments more than 30 years since its run in the theater. Grumpy Old Men is one of them.
Surfing the DirecTV streaming app the other night for something to watch before hitting the hay, I saw the 1993 film listed and dived right in. So what if it had started a half-hour earlier? I enjoyed it again anyway, and it brought back some great memories.
When Minnesota meant fishing and (sometimes) friendly neighbors…
Our neighbors to the west have been much in the news lately, and not for their ice fishing or old-fashioned neighborhoods or even their once-famed “Minnesota Nice.” But we’re not going to go there. Minnesota 2026 isn’t nearly as nice as Minnesota 1993 was. Grumpy Old Men is set in Wabasha, a charming town of about 2500 on the Mississippi in the southwest corner of the state. It was filmed in various Minnesota locations early in ’93 and released on Christmas Day, quickly becoming one of the surprise hits of the year. Part of that was due to the chemistry of the leading men, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, who had teamed up on screen many times, going back to The Fortune Cookie (1966). They would wind up doing ten films together; their last team-up was 1998’s The Odd Couple II, reprising the famous characters they’d first played 30 years earlier.
Lemmon plays John Gustafson Jr., a retired history teacher, and Matthau is his next-door neighbor, Max Goldman, a widowed former TV repairman. They were chums as kids but had a falling-out as young adults when John married Max’s high school sweetheart. It’s been nearly a half-century, but Max has never forgiven John, even though John divorced her after she was unfaithful to him, and Max wound up meeting a wonderful woman and enjoying a long and happy marriage with her.
Much of the film takes place on the Mississippi, where each of them has an ice-fishing shanty, part of a little village that is very common on Minnesota and Wisconsin lakes and rivers. (Lake Rebecca stands in for the river in the film.) Burgess Meredith has a stellar turn as John’s 91-year-old father, John Sr., who takes full advantage of the benefits of being that old, in that he can say whatever he damn well pleases and if others don’t like it, too bad. Ann-Margret is Ariel, a widowed English teacher and artist who moves in across the street from John and Max. She quickly becomes a focus of both men’s romantic interests.
Without revealing too much about the film, there are some hilarious moments, many of them involving John Sr. (After learning that his son has been seeing Ariel, he asks, “Have you mounted her yet?”) There are also more than a few tender and touching scenes, as John Jr. and Max confront their age and loneliness, and come to grips with the friendship that each of them secretly wants to rekindle.
A hit in theaters…but will it be boffo on a bus?
The movie premiered on Christmas Day 1993 and was a surprise box office hit. Sue and I saw it back then in Rice Lake. This was a little more than a year after we’d started dating and we’d eventually marry in November 1995. It was a month of so before our own wedding that we co-hosted a bus trip down to Branson, Missouri. Escorting a bus to Branson or Nashville, or in one case around Lake Superior, was an annual thing for us back in the ’90s, a joint project of my radio station and her travel agency, which at the time had a bus-tour division. A couple weeks before departing, we would look over the itinerary and plan the “bus days” together. There would always be one day going down, and one coming home, in which we’d be on the road virtually all day. What would we do in between stops? Sometimes we’d have games or contests, or open-mic comedy bits (which would always take side-splitting turns), and there would be one or two movies per day. For our ’95 Branson trip, we considered Grumpy Old Men. Since virtually all of our people were senior citizens, we thought that maybe this film might a little too saucy in its humor. “What the hell,” I said, “let’s do it.”
They loved it. We’d never seen people laugh that hard. I seriously thought some of them might pass out. If you’ve never seen the movie, the trailer gives you a glimpse of what’s in store for you: Grumpy Old Men.
So now, here I was in early 2026, some 32 years after Sue and I first saw the film. How did it hold up?
Still grumpy, funny and touching.
The humor was still there. Ann-Margret, who was 51 when she filmed her role as Ariel, was as stunning as ever. Lemmon (68 at the time) and Matthau (72) had the magic of two old pros who could turn any script into a classic. Meredith (85) still had the best lines. Even the supporting roles were pitch-perfect: Kevin Pollak as Max’s son Jacob, Darryl Hannah as John’s daughter Melanie, and Ossie Davis as the guys’ friend, Chuck, the bait-shop owner who seems to have the early lead in the contest to claim the hand of Ariel.
After Chuck drops out of the running for Ariel, it seems like Max has the upper hand, but then John has, shall we say, a moment with her that is eye-opening for him. There’s a scene where John confronts his mortality, and he talks movingly, and with not a little frustration, to his daughter about how his life has turned out. “I’m 68 years old,” he says as he begins his litany of disappointments, and right away it struck me: I’m older than that now.
To say I identified with John a little bit right then would be a serious understatement.
But just a “little bit.” Unlike John, I don’t have problems with the IRS, have been happily married to Sue for 30 years, I’m not angry at my daughter’s husband, and I’m certainly not still carrying on a half-century-old feud with my boyhood best friend. My friendship with Dave Esser is some 56 years along now, and although we don’t live next door–he’s still down in Grant County, a 4-hour drive away–we stay in touch and see each other a couple times a year. For a time he was seriously dating a woman also named Sue, although sadly, that didn’t work out. (Too bad; it would’ve been Dave & Sue & Dave & Sue.)
John is lucky at 68 to have his father still with him; my own dad passed away four years ago this June. John spends time fishing with his father and that pastime provided me with some of my best memories with my own dad, going all the way back to my kindergarten days.
I don’t mind telling you that it all comes together with a happy ending, cleverly done by the scriptwriters and played effortlessly by the cast. Even though I already knew how it would come out, I was impressed with the skill in which it was handled by all concerned. There were some real pros at work on this picture, that’s for sure.
There was, of course, a sequel.
Two years later, most of the cast got back together to do it again. Grumpier Old Men was set in the summer, with fishing still the backdrop for the now-reconciled best friends. They’re engaged in yet another summer-long pursuit of “Catfish Hunter,” a trophy-sized catfish that has eluded all anglers in the area for years. Chuck’s old bait shop closed after his death, and has now been purchased by an Italian woman who plans to convert it into a restaurant. Max is upset that the bait shop isn’t coming back, but then he meets the new owner.
To say that Sophia Loren, 61 at the time of filming, was luminous as Maria would be a serious understatement. Pretty much the entire main cast of Grumpy returns to reprise their roles, including Burgess Meredith, appearing in what turned out to be his final film; as John Sr., he still has his share of great moments, as well as a little “encounter” of his own with Maria’s mother, Francesca, played by Ann Morgan Guilbert (only 67 herself at the time, she still shines as a woman some 20 years older). Like most sequels, Grumpier wasn’t as popular with critics and audiences as its predecessor, but it still did pretty good business.
Lemmon and Matthau did two more films together, the aforementioned The Odd Couple II and 1997’s Out to Sea, in which they play brothers-in-law who sign on as dance hosts on a cruise ship. Brent Spiner, who played the android Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the tyrannical cruise director. Providing a love interest for Matthau is Dyan Cannon, who proves without a doubt that she can still convincingly play a romantic partner at age 60. Her mother is played by Hollywood legend Gloria DeHaven in her final role. Edward Mulhare and Donald O’Connor also make their last film appearances in supporting roles. The film had some good moments, mostly provided by the still-awesome chemistry between Lemmon and Matthau, and there’s also an hysterical outtake reel at the end of the film, in which Matthau has one of the all-time great intentional-blooper lines as he’s escorting Cannon back to her cabin after a tryst on deck.
Do I want to be a grumpy old man?
As mentioned, I’m now older than Lemmon was when he played John Gustafson Jr. for the first time. I’ve never considered myself an old man, grumpy or otherwise, although I have seen these T-shirts and while I have yet to buy one, I’ve been giving it some thought:
Many of the stars of the Grumpy films are no longer with us. Matthau died in 2000 at 79, Lemmon in 2001 at 76. Meredith passed away shortly after filming the sequel. Ann-Margret and Sophia Loren are still with us, still beautiful and still working: Ann-Margret, soon to be 85, appeared on the big screen in Queen Bees in 2021 and on TV in a holiday film a year later; Loren, now 91, most recently played herself on a Netflix documentary, What Would Sophia Loren Do?
I have no doubt that my bride, Sue, will be just as gorgeous in her 80s and 90s as she is today in her…well, not 80s or 90s! I’m truly a lucky man…and I’m not grumpy.
A Strenuous Writer's Life 