California Suite (1978)
Runtime: 1 hr 43 mins
Synopsis: Neil Simon's bittersweet comedy, adapted from the Broadway hit, follows four separate stories of guests who've just checked into the swank Beverly Hills Hotel over the weekend of the Academy Awards gala. The four-part story line runs the gamut from touching introspection to outright... Neil Simon's bittersweet comedy, adapted from the Broadway hit, follows four separate stories of guests who've just checked into the swank Beverly Hills Hotel over the weekend of the Academy Awards gala. The four-part story line runs the gamut from touching introspection to outright slapstick. Bill and Hannah Warren (Alan Alda and Jane Fonda) are an angry divorced duo engaged in a nasty custody battle over their daughter. Marvin Michaels (Walter Matthau) is in town a day before his devoted wife (Elaine May) for his nephew's bar mitzvah when his brother sends him a present that is difficult to hide--a hooker. Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith) is an Oscar-nominated British actress in town for the Academy Awards with her husband, Sydney (Michael Caine), who happens to be gay. Competing doctors Willis Panama (Bill Cosby) and Chauncey Gump (Richard Pryor) have been busy containing calamities befalling them since they arrived and discovered they had to share a hotel room with their crestfallen wives. CALIFORNIA SUITE, in the capable hands of director Herbert Ross, is a simultaneously touching and hilarious vision of everyday people struggling to survive. (Smith, interestingly enough, won an Oscar for her role in the film.) [More]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Alan Alda, Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, Maggie Smith, Bill Cosby
DVD Info
Release:
Jan 2, 2002
DVD Features:
- Region 1
- Keep Case
- Widescreen
- Full Frame
Audio:
- Dolby Digital Stereo - English
Interactive Features:
- Interactive Menus
- Scene Selection
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
Less than successful, veering from poignant emotionalism to broad slapstick in sudden shifts.
Means middle-class angst covered with a thin veneer of snappy one-liners and presented in the most anonymous directorial style imaginable.
Quick and varied comedy, highly suited to Neil Simon's machine-gun gag-writing.
Maggie Smith won a seond, Supporting Oscar for playing a hard-drinking, hard-talking actress who complains to her bisexual antique-dealer husband (Michael Caine), "Acting doesn't win Oscars. What I need is a dying father."
Dire: good actors playing the worst versions of one-dimensional Neil Simon joke machines.
California Suite offers audiences a fine blend of laughter and variety which is the spice of good comic cinema.
News
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