Too much of everything

Better Late Then Never

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Four Academy Award winners share the spotlight in this all-star comedy along with some of the great funny men and women of the 20th Century. Walter Matthau, Maggie Smith, Jane Fonda and Michael Caine all took home Oscars (Matthau one, the rest two each, one of them for this), and they are joined by Academy Award nominated writer Elaine May, comic legends Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, TV and stage legend Alan Alda, as well as supporting performances by Herb Edelman, Gloria Gifford, Sheila Frazier and Dana Plato. The four vignettes are a mixture of bitchy drawing room comedy, riotous farce, War of the Roses like battles and one misfire that surprisingly did not result in homicide or mass suicide. It's all from the pen of Neil Simon that this mixture of great and not so great plots and dialog spring forth, but in the end, it's what's great that springs the rating up higher, while two fall in the middle and one, well, not so much.The Cosby/Pryor scenes are the worst, unfunny and violent and often cruel in nature. Two couples (Cosby with Frazier, Pryor with Gifford) spring for a deluxe vacation at the Beverly Hills Hotel and end up fighting amongst themselves. Not light-hearted arguing, but bone breaking slap downs. It's surprisingly humorless in spite of the two male stars and left me cold, not just because of the racial stereotypes involving black couples being vindictive and violent, but not even Three Stooges type violence which it strives for. The two wives seem too far sophisticated to allow themselves to get involved in such ghetto mentality activities. The Walter Matthau sketch is moderately funny as his brother Herb Edelman (Stan, "Golden Girls") sets him up with a younger woman, and his efforts to hide her when his wife Elaine May arrives. The chemistry between Matthau and May is perfect, and Matthau and Edelman really do seem like brothers. It's a 70's "Three's Company" sitcom like scenario with Matthau obviously Mr. Roper and May obviously Mrs. Roper, and in spite of some scattered laughs, seems often to be forced. Denise Galik (best known to me as Karen Wexler's mother, Rhonda, on "General Hospital") is the sexy babe Edelman springs forth, her efforts for a rendezvous with Matthau amusingly fouled up.This leads me to the War of the Roses like pairing of Jane Fonda and Alan Alda as a divorced couple fighting over their daughter (Plato). It is perhaps the most serious of the four sketches, with Fonda a strong, powerful businesswoman from New York and Alda a screenwriter whom Plato wants to live with. While the idea of two together seems a surefire match, it isn't with Fonda seemingly trying to overpower the easy going Alda. It's the most theatrical seeming of the group of stories, probably better played on a one room set on stage than in the locations where it was moved to for this movie. Fonda and Alda seem like they might have been better paired a decade ago, because her humorless character really doesn't sparkle on screen with his very likable character.That brings me to the best of the best, the Maggie Smith/Michael Caine Academy Award sequence. She's an Oscar nominee, complaining about "Glenda Jackson being nominated every year", and upset that after many great dramatic performances, she got nominated for a comedy. When Smith and Caine are on-screen, you long for the focus to remain on them and not move back to any of the other three. While this again could have been Smith eating Caine alive, the opposite is true. Certainly, Smith's bitchy lines towards her bi-sexual husband Caine are outrageously funny and biting, but he makes being her straight man one of the funniest elements in the film. Smith becomes the British Tallulah Bankhead as her snarky comments rip to the core, and she deservedly won her second Oscar for her second Neil Simon film, having already taken one liners to the heights in "Murder By Death".Multi-story films with unrelated characters are always a mixed bag, as it is obvious some will work, but some won't. It's obvious who was having fun and who was just doing it for the paycheck and who considered it a challenge. Herbert Ross, a master at directing film versions of Broadway plays (many of them Simon's, a few of them Simon's original works as well), is the perfect choice to guide most of the cast to success. Perhaps the weakest segment could have been toned down as it seems that what worked on stage just came off as obnoxious on screen, but that's a minor issue in an overall fun confection of comedy talent with one that stands out as a gem and one of the great couplings in film that Lunt and Fontanne from beyond must have envied.

Neil Simon had one of the better works of 1978 as his comedy drama "California Suite" is a really well done take on the adventures and ups and downs of life and he shows it with an intersection of different characters all who check in and out of a Beverly Hills Hotel. Yet the characters involved have come for different reasons still all involved face personal dilemmas.You have a British couple Sidney Cochran(Michael Caine)who has to battle with his depressed actress wife Diana(Maggie Smith)who's in an outrage when she loses at the Oscars!(oddly enough Smith would win a real Oscar for best supporting actress in this role). Still thru it all no loss can prevent the love that this couple has to conquer it all.Next up on the plate is Marvin Michaels(Walter Matthau)an old east coast guy who visits the west coast only to explain to his arrived wife(Elaine May)how a sexy California blonde hooker got in his bed. This act is funny and it takes an interesting twist at the end! Then it's funny and educational as we see Hannah Warren(Jane Fonda)who's a witty educated snob and proper like socialite who's uneasy about her ex husband's(the good Alan Alda) new California life. As Hannah wants their daughter to go back with her and her new life on the east coast. This was one interesting segment as the chemistry between Fonda and Alda is top notch.And to round out two Chicago friends a doctor named Gump(the very funny Richard Pryor)and his friend(Bill Cosby)take a trip to California for vacation and both have manners that conflicts with imposing means! Overall well done picture from Neil Simon that's funny with wit and charm showing that life, love, and relationship is drama and a fun challenge of change and time. Really this is one movie to watch and enjoy.

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 ****