Buddy Buddy is a 1981 American comedy film based on Francis Veber's play Le contrat and Édouard Molinaro's film L'emmerdeur. It was the final film directed and written by Billy Wilder.
Plot
To earn his long-awaited retirement, hitman Trabucco eliminates several witnesses against the mob. On his way to his last assignment, Rudy "Disco" Gambola, who is about to testify before a jury at the court of Riverside, California, he encounters Victor Clooney, an emotionally disturbed television censor, who is trying to reconcile with his estranged wife Celia. Trabucco takes a room in the Ramona Hotel in Riverside, across the street from the courthouse where Gambola is to arrive soon. As ill chance would have it, Victor moves into the neighboring room at the same hotel, and after he calls Celia and she turns him down, he tries to kill himself. His clumsy first attempt alerts Trabucco, and fearing the unwelcome attention of the nearby police guarding the courthouse, he decides to accompany Victor in order to quietly eliminate him, but his attempts are repeatedly foiled by inconvenient happenstances.
Trabucco and Victor head to the nearby Institute for Sexual Fulfillment, the clinic where Celia, a researcher for 60 Minutes, has enlisted because she has become enthralled with the clinic's director, Dr. Zuckerbrot. After Celia spurns him again, they return to the hotel, where Victor attempts to leap off the building after setting himself on fire. While moving to stop him, Trabucco accidentally knocks himself out, and Victor, having a change of heart, brings him back inside and tries to take care of him. However, Zuckerbrot, sent by Celia to have Victor confined in a mental institution, arrives and injects Trabucco, whom he mistakes for Victor, with a tranquilizer. With Gambola's arrival imminent, Trabucco tries to fulfill his contract but is too groggy to make the shot. After seeing him preparing his rifle and learning about Trabucco's true nature, Victor volunteers to take out Gambola in order to help his new "best friend". Victor succeeds, and the two escape the police after Trabucco, posing as a priest, has made sure that Gambola is dead, but he refuses Victor's company and heads off alone.
Months later, Trabucco enjoys his tropical island retreat until he is unexpectedly joined by Victor. Victor explains that he is wanted by the police after blowing up Zuckerbrot's clinic, and Celia has run off with the doctor's female receptionist to become a lesbian couple. Desperate to see the irritating Victor off, Trabucco suggests to his native servant the possibility of reviving the old custom of sacrificing humans in the local volcano.
Cast
Production
Development
L'emmerdeur, a huge hit in Europe, had been released as "A Pain in the Ass" in art houses in the United States, where it had enjoyed moderate box office success. Jay Weston of William Morris Agency, obtained the remake rights and pitched the film for Matthau, Lemmon and Wilder to work on.
Wilder said of the film: "If I met all my old pictures in a crowd, personified, there are some that would make me happy and proud, and I would embrace them ... but Buddy Buddy I'd try to ignore."
"I couldn't say no to Billy," Matthau said later, "and I didn't want to say no to being in a Billy Wilder picture. But this wasn't a Billy Wilder picture." "Iz Diamond and I were working on another project," said Wilder, "when William Morris came to us with this one. We looked at the French movie and saw possibilities in it. I would prefer doing an original story or screenplay. The most fun is working on a movie like Sunset Boulevard or The Apartment, where you start from scratch. Here I found myself with a ready-made thing, but there are certain advantages to that. I didn't have to audition for the studios and pass through Checkpoint Charlie before they would approve the project. We knew we had a starting date, which is rare enough these days."
Wilder said, "I hadn't been working enough, and I was anxious to get back on the horse and do what I do – write, direct. This wasn't a picture I would have chosen." Wilder and Diamond wrote the script in three months - "a record for us" said Wilder - but then they "sat on it" waiting for the Actors Guild strike to end, and for Lemmon and Matthau to become available. The film roughly followed the original, although the ending was changed.