SnoopyStyle
Various guests arrive at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Hannah (Jane Fonda) and Bill Warren (Alan Alda) are a troubled couple getting a divorce. Chauncey Gump (Richard Pryor) and Willis Panama (Bill Cosby) are bickering Chicago doctors vacationing with their wives. London actress Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith) travels with her closeted husband Sidney Cochran (Michael Caine) for her Oscar nomination. Marvin Michaels (Walter Matthau) is surprised by the call girl sent by his sleazy brother Harry and then his wife arrives.The four stories have varying effectiveness. I most wanted to see this movie for Pryor. His and Cosby's section has the foursome in quirky slapstick comedy. It's odd. Pryor is more known in slapstick with usual partner Gene Wilder. Cosby's present day troubles is problematic. Matthau's section has one main scene. It suffers a little due to the fact that he's not an innocent. It would be infinitely funnier if none of it is his fault. Imagine him finding the hooker naked in bed and immediately his wife arrives. That way he does nothing wrong and is left with all the blame. That would be infinitely funnier. The Fonda Alda coupling is rather forgettable and it could have been more. Maybe if their children joins them and they have to deal with them. Smith and Caine have the best part. In fact, Maggie gets an Oscar which is ironic for this story. They do great work and have room to do the work.
callanvass
This movie is mildly enjoyable, thanks to the amazing cast alone. With a cast like this, it should have been a lot better than it was. Anyway, Michael Caine & Maggie Smith play a rather disjointed couple coming from New York to attend The Oscars. Jane Fonda & Alan Alda are no longer together, argue constantly about custody of their daughter. Bill Cosby & Richard Pryor's wives come to play tennis and chill, but chaos ensues when they find out there is only one room vacant. Walter Matthau has too much to drink and sleeps with a prostitute. The stories are all interesting enough, but none of them are all that dynamic. Matthau has some great comic sequences, but i'd have to say Cosby & Pryor were the least interesting. It wasn't all that funny. The best is a tie between Caine & Smith's and Fonda & Alda. If it wasn't for a cast, this would have been very mediocre. 6/10
edwagreen
Neil Simon focuses his attention on a variety of people at a hotel in this 1978 comedy hit.Walter Matthau certainly has a penchant as a hotel guest. Remember him with Maureen Stapleton and several other ladies in another hotel farce comedy-drama?Matthau, as always, is hilarious when he attempts to hide a hooker from his wife. It seems that Elaine May is always the naive victim in films. Remember her in 1972's "The Heartbreak Kid?"The real acting kudos here goes to Maggie Smith for a gem of a supporting Oscar-winning performance in this film. Smith plays an actress at the hotel who has been nominated for an Oscar. A win would mean a tremendous comeback for her. Naturally, she loses. How many people have won Oscars for playing an Oscar loser in a film? Judy Garland accomplished the opposite in 1954 in "A Star is Born." In the film she is an actress who wins the academy award but in real-life competition lost it to Grace Kelly for "The Country Girl." Only the lord knows why.Smith is just grand as she prances around the room delivering memorable one-liners. This is just a gem of a film.
moonspinner55
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 ****
AD
