Good start, but then it gets ruined

Excellent but underrated film

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"California Suite" was written by Neil Simon and, as with most films for which he acted as scriptwriter, it is based on one of his stage plays. The main idea is similar to that in his earlier "Plaza Suite", namely that of following the adventures of different guests staying in the same hotel, in this case in Los Angeles. It is a "portmanteau film" with four separate stories and the hotel providing the one point of contact between them. (An earlier film with a similar premise was "The VIPs", based around several groups of travellers passing through Heathrow Airport). Hannah, a New Yorker, has flown out to California to meet her former husband Bill and to discuss the future of their teenage daughter. Diana Barrie, a British actress, and her husband Sidney are in town because she has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Two doctors from Chicago (with the unlikely names of Dr. Chauncey Gump and Dr. Willis Panama) are on vacation with their wives. And Marvin, a Jewish businessman from Philadelphia, and his wife Millie have come out for their nephew's Bar Mitzvah. The "Visitors from Chicago" story, by far the weakest of the four, is little more than a not-very-amusing slapstick comedy based around the idea that the four characters, especially the two men, cannot move a hand or a foot without breaking something or injuring themselves. I wondered if the American Medical Association were considering suing Simon for the libellous insinuation that they would grant a licence to practise medicine to two such idiots. The Marvin story is a farce based around Marvin's increasingly desperate attempts to hide from his wife that there is another woman in his hotel room, with whom he spent the previous night. (They were unable to travel together and she flew out a night later to join him). Farce can often be desperately unfunny on screen; the cinema version of "No Sex Please, We're British", for example, gives little hint that it was based on one of the most successful West End stage plays of the seventies. Walter Matthau, however, plays Marvin so well (with good support from Elaine May as his wife) that this segment becomes highly entertaining. Simon, of course, is from New York and most of his plays are set in his home city, but here he makes a rare foray to the West Coast. As his fellow New Yorker Woody Allen had done in "Annie Hall" the previous year, Simon takes the opportunity for some comments on the culture wars between America's Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. Hannah and Bill can be taken as representing the East and West Coast respectively. She is a driven, sharp-tongued, neurotic and workaholic New Yorker, he is a gentler, more laid-back Californian (although possibly an adopted rather than a native son of the Golden State). Jane Fonda (looking even more stunning at the age of 40 than she had done ten years earlier in "Barbarella", especially when she gets to frolic on the beach in a bikini) and Alan Alda both play their parts to perfection; she in particular gets to deliver some of Simon's most barbed lines, like "I don't have a lifestyle. I have a life." and "You're the sort of person who'd solve the world hunger problem by having them all eat out. Preferably in a good Chinese restaurant!" I could certainly imagine Allen writing lines like that. The fourth story is a bit more serious. Maggie Smith won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Diana, thus going one better than her character, who loses out, and I must say it was well deserved, although she might have faced some stiff competition had Fonda been nominated. (This was the year when Fonda won "Best Actress" for "Coming Home", so I don't suppose she minded too much). This is the most serious of the four stories. Sidney is gay, and he and Diana are in a "lavender marriage", possibly a more daring plot line in 1978 than it would be today. Although they love one another in a non- sexual way, Diana has entered into this arrangement because her image as a happily married woman is good for public relations, but Sidney's indiscreet behaviour, however, has started to put this image at risk. Even though she has had a successful stage career, Diana's failure to win the Oscar is a blow to her rather fragile self-esteem, and despite her curious relationship with Sidney she finds herself relying on him for emotional support. Given his normal screen image as a red-blooded ladies' man, Michael Caine might seem an odd choice to play Sidney, but in fact he is very good. Simon's plays can vary in quality when transferred to the screen. For example, "Barefoot in the Park" (which also starred Fonda, not nearly as good as she is here) today comes across as horribly mannered and dated. "California Suite", however, is one of the better ones. One of the weaknesses of the portmanteau form is that it does not allow for the depth of plot and character development which is possible in a film based around a single story. It also has its strengths, however, one of which is its ability to combine various moods in a single film. "California Suite" is normally categorised as a comedy, and for three- quarters of the time it is, although the tone of the comedy varies from slapstick to farce to verbal wit. In the fourth story, however, it becomes a more serious character study. It enables director Herbert Ross to demonstrate several contrasting styles of film-making, featuring contrasting styles of acting, without the contrasts ever seeming jarring. 7/10, which would have been higher had the "Visitors from Chicago" story been of similar quality to the others.

I'm biased - I'm a Neil Simon fan who loves the concept of the "Suite" plays (on stage, each act is a one-act play using the same set, with the actors playing different roles each act). Obviously, because the stories are intertwined in the film, they couldn't do that (they didn't do in "London Suite" either).But, here's my complaint: the intertwining is sloppy. We'll sometimes spend twenty or so minutes with a plot, then get a quick cutaway with another (Walter Matthau's plot doesn't really kick in until an hour's passed; Alan Alda disappears after forty-five minutes).Despite this balancing flaw, there are goodies to be found: Visitors From New York: Alda and Jane Fonda have great chemistry (and, of course, she looks great!): one can really believe they were a couple. That being said, he's pretty weak, letting her get in a lot of bitchy lines, and barely sticking up for himself. Three stars.Visitors From London: A lot of people think this is the best segment, and I'm one of them. Once again, Maggie Smith and Michael Caine give excellent performances (but there's a touch of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" throughout the whole scenario) - she deserved her Oscar (and I love that they filmed at an actual Oscars ceremony). Four stars.Visitors From Philadelphia: First of all, Elaine May was reminding me so much of Louise Lasser. That being said, I could totally buy her and Matthau together, and I love how calm she was upon her discovery (she gets a great line regarding what she's gonna do). Three and a half stars.Visitors From Chicago: Unfairly criticized. Sure, it's slapstick in the extreme (it gives us an idea how "The Out of Towners" may have looked if confined to "Plaza Suite," which it was intended for), but there's something quite cool about two very different masters of stand up, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, going up against one another ("clean" vs. "dirty"?). And, you just know that a few weeks later, the characters got together and had a good laugh about it. Three and a quarter stars.Throw in a nice credit sequence, with David Hockney paintings, and you have a fine way to spend two hours.

Despite a talented all-star cast, "California Suite," which was based on a hit Neil Simon play, is a wildly uneven film. The episodic story traces several unrelated couples from across the U.S. that check into a Beverly Hills hotel. Like a comedic "Grand Hotel," the film cuts between the stories, although the editing makes no comments, ironic or otherwise, between the episodes. Actually, the often foolish, self-centered characters make "California Suite" more a "Ship of Fools" in the sunshine than a "Grand Hotel" under the palms. The original play was a follow-up to the more successful "Plaza Suite" and demonstrated Simon's shakier take on the West Coast than on the East. For the most part, the hotel guests speak and behave like the transplanted or visiting New Yorkers that they are.Jane Fonda portrays the ultimate New York snob, and her bitchy banter with ex-husband Alan Alda only underscores her arrogance and intolerance of anything that exists west of the Hudson. Alda is a New Yorker's stereotype of a Californian with pastel sweaters and perpetual tan. While a few amusing lines pass between the terminally mismatched couple, Fonda and Alda's episode is more grating than funny. However, the New York couple display Noel-Coward wit in comparison to the wasted talents and misfires in the scenes that involve Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby as vacationing doctors. The premise of two couples that arrive to find a reservation for only one has promise. However, director Herbert Ross should have studied Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd before he devised the broad, unfunny physical stunts that will leave viewers grateful that both Pryor and Cosby survived the mess and moved on to better material.However, the film does have some fine moments between comedic experts Walter Matthau and Elaine May. When Matthau arrives in LA a day early, his brother surprises him with a prostitute, who passes out from too much tequila and cannot be awakened in the morning. Of course, Matthau's wife, the always-delicious Elaine May, arrives, and the comedy moves into high gear. The best episode in the film, however, involves an English actress, Maggie Smith, and her bisexual husband, Michael Caine. The couple arrives to attend the Academy Awards, because Smith is a Best Actress nominee. While Smith has some of the best-written lines in the film, her role also has a depth and poignancy that goes far beyond the cardboard characters in the other episodes. Although Caine is equally fine, Smith's role is showier, and she won a deserved Academy Award for the part. The film's special irony is that the part of an Oscar-losing-actress won an Oscar for the actress who played her."California Suite" is one of those films in which a few superior scenes make it worthy entertainment, and the Smith-Caine episode pulls the film several notches higher than it otherwise deserves. Add the sparkling Matthau-May scenes, and there is at least one-half of a good movie. Although the Fonda-Alda episode is bearable and occasionally amusing, the Pryor-Cosby scenes are often labored and unfunny. However, with a strong finger on the fast-forward button, there is a good hour of comedy and fine performances to be had in this inconsistent film.

Neil Simon got an Oscar nomination for adapting his own hit play for the screen, but his writing seems to be caught in a perpetual time-warp. No subject that gets discussed is fresh, and all his 'witty' one-liners would fall flat without the help of some talented actors to keep things afloat. A Beverly Hills hotel houses Jane Fonda and Alan Alda as bickering ex-marrieds; Walter Matthau as a husband trying to hide a hooker from wife Elaine May; Michael Caine as the put-upon husband of Oscar-nominated actress Maggie Smith (who really did win an Oscar); and Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as accident-prone husbands vacationing with their wives. Aside from the acidic verbal jousting from Caine and Smith, this comedy directed by Herbert Ross pretty much congeals midway through. Matthau's exaggerated angst is pretty funny, but this seems rote material for the actor (though he and Elaine May are well-matched). Fonda may well have accepted her dim role for the sole excuse to show off her figure in a bikini (it upstages even Alan Alda!). As for Cosby and Pryor--how could Herbert Ross sink two of the most famous comedians of the 1970s with this slapstick torpedo? Neil Simon seems to believe in the Pain of Comedy, with life's woes wrung for laughs, and he gets Ross to believe it, too. But there's too much physical shtick and not enough humanity in "California Suite" to make it the laugh-fest everyone was apparently aiming for. ** from ****