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 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 to quietly eliminate him, but his attempts are repeatedly foiled by inconvenient happenstances.

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.

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 to help his new "best friend".

Months later, Trabucco enjoys his tropical island's 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 off the irritating Victor, Trabucco suggests to his native servant the possibility of reviving the old custom of sacrificing humans in the local volcano.

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 on the film for Matthau, Lemmon and Wilder to work.

The most fun is working on a movie like Sunset Boulevard or The Apartment, where you start from scratch.

"[6] 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.

"[5] 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.

But unlike Kiss Me, Stupid, this is a commercial movie - nothing arty in it, nothing very serious, somewhere in between Stir Crazy and George Bernard Shaw.

[2] He gave a key role to Klaus Kinski, calling him "an extraordinary actor ... a funny Nosferatau.

I just regret how the whole thing dissolved by selling off the props and art when Jim Aubrey was hired to supervise the graves here.

Wilder gave him a copy of the script, and Veber said, "I thought then that I saw flaws in it and wanted to tell him about them but I didn't dare.

Eager to bounce back from the unhappy experience, he and Diamond immediately went to work writing what they hoped would be their next project.

Calling it "slight but irresistible", Canby observed that it "doesn't compare with the greatest Wilder-Diamond films, including The Fortune Cookie, which launched Mr. Lemmon and Mr. Matthau as a team, but it is the lightest, breeziest comedy any one of them has been associated with in years."

It doesn't attempt to overwhelm you with the kind of gigantic sets, props and crowd scenes that made farces on the order of 1941 and The Blues Brothers so oppressive.

He said of Lemmon, "Not in a long time has [he] been more appealing", and he described Matthau as "extremely comic – perhaps our best farceur".

It succeeds in reducing two of the most charming actors in American motion picture history to unlikable ciphers.

Can you imagine a film that co-stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon and yet contains no charm, ebullience, wit, charisma – even friendliness?

This whole movie is like one of those pathetic Hollywood monsters drained of its life fluids ... Basically, we are invited to watch two drudges meander through a witless, pointless exercise in farce ...

Channel 4 said, "Wilder helming the classic comic pairing of Matthau and Lemmon is always going to be difficult to dismiss, but it has to be said that all involved had seen better days at the time this got made ...

Sometimes you have a funeral and an opening on the same day, and you don't feel very good when you see a comedy after you've put somebody to rest or watched the Neptune Society blow his ashes into the Pacific Ocean ...