Walter Matthau: TV Actor?

Sitting pool side at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, Walter Matthau is being stubborn as a photographer tries to snap his photo.

“Could you take your sunglasses off?,” the photographer asks, referring to the plastic surf shades that seem as unfitting on the loose-fitting lines of Matthau’s lugubrious face as would a mustache on Mona Lisa.

“It’s better with the glasses. Everybody knows that,” he says wryly, his baritone voice dipping several octaves to emphasize his point. “Movie star. Hollywood. Gotta keep the glasses.” He reclines in his chair and tilts his head up toward the California sunshine.

Matthau was never one to take the Hollywood image too seriously. He’s proving it now by doing what many accomplished feature film players would snub--he’s starring in his first made-for-TV movie. In “The Incident,” a dramatic CBS movie that airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8, Matthau plays a small-town lawyer forced to defend a World War II German POW accused of murdering a popular local citizen (played by Barnard Hughes).

Why did Matthau, who at 69 is a grizzled Broadway and feature film veteran--having won two Tonys for performances in “The Odd Couple” and “A Shot in the Dark” and an Oscar for “The Fortune Cookie”--agree to do a TV movie? Is the older Hollywood actor slowing down, putting himself out to graze in TV’s greener pastures?

On the contrary.

“I’m doing it because I was offered a well-written script with a social theme,” Matthau said. “Any time you show me that, I’ll do it. Feature films once had the better scripts. And now things have sort of turned around. Features don’t seem to have the same kind of drama that they used to.”

Matthau is quick to add, however, that even though the face of television is changing, not all TV is good TV. “Generally speaking, TV is a monster,” he drawled, stretching out his vowels like taffy. “It absorbs everything that comes within 5 million light years. It’s like a black hole.”

One of the main reasons Matthau agreed to do the TV movie was because of its director, Delbert Mann, who had directed Matthau for television in a “Philco Playhouse” production of “Othello” in 1952. But before shooting began, Mann had to quit the project for health reasons and was replaced by Emmy Award-winning director Joseph Sargent. Matthau never flinched, taking the game of musical directors’ chairs in stride. It seems Matthau had worked for Mann before, too, as the grumbling security detective in the 1974 thriller “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”

After more than 50 feature films, there are not many people in the entertainment industry with whom Matthau hasn’t worked. He had spent nearly two decades as a character actor on stage, mostly in his native New York, before coming into his own on Broadway in 1965 as the sloppy Oscar Madison in Neil Simon’s comedy “The Odd Couple,” co-starring Art Carney.

For “The Incident,” Matthau was cast in a serious role. The actor says the part wasn’t a stretch; he still feels close to World War II. His mother was from Lithuania, where many of his relatives were killed during the war. And Matthau served on the front lines in Germany as a radio operator gunner for the U.S. Army Air Force, which honored him with six battle stars.

In the movie, Matthau plays a lawyer whose appointment to defend a Nazi private charged with murder makes him an outcast in his hometown.

“The theme of the movie is: Honesty and integrity should come above personal prejudice,” Matthau said. “It usually does not. That’s what appealed to me about this story. . . . I mean, if this was a story about a guy who thinks that Noriega is a role model for children, then I wouldn’t do it.”

Matthau lives in Pacific Palisades, a restful neighborhood where there are endless miles of sidewalks for him to walk. There in the suburban quiet, the die-hard classical music fan listens to Mozart for as many as eight hours a day. When he watches sports on TV, he turns down the volume and puts on a Mozart divertimento to liven up the action.

Matthau said: “I wanted to play Salieri in ‘Amadeus.’ I called Milos Forman, who directed it, and I said, ‘Listen Milos, I want to play Mozart.’ He said, ‘ Mozart died at 36 .’ I said, ‘That’s all right. I can play 36.’ ”

Matthau’s deadpan expression broke slightly and a hint of a smile curled his lips. “See, I thought he would say, ‘You’re not right for Mozart, you can possibly play Salieri.’ But he never suggested it.”

Matthau recently conducted Mozart publicly as an invited guest for the Mozart Symphony Orchestra and the Beverly Hills Symphony Orchestra. The actor and amateur conductor (“I told the audience, ‘Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing this in front of a mirror for 62 years’ ”) said he does not plan to disappear from the public eye the way many of his contemporaries have.

“Why should I slow down now?,” Matthau said. “I’ll have time for that later. That’s when I’m dead. I’ll get plenty of peace and quiet then. I’ll take a break and spend lots of time in the country.”