California Suite (1978)

Four stories about visitors to Los Angeles who stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel: A New Yorker (Jane Fonda) comes to L.A. to get her runaway daughter (Dana Plato) back from her ex-husband (Alan Alda). An Oscar nominee (Maggie Smith in an Oscar winning performance) and her gay husband (Michael Caine) fly in from London to attend the ceremonies. A visitor from Philadelphia (Walter Matthau) wakes up to find an unconscious hooker (Denise Galik) in his bed and his wife (Elaine May) due in any minute. Two doctors (Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor) and their wives (Gloria Gifford, Sheila Frazier) visiting from Chicago find themselves constantly at odds with each other, eventually ending in fisticuffs. Based on the play by Neil Simon and directed by Herbert Ross (STEEL MAGNOLIAS). A companion piece to his PLAZA SUITE which was set in New York, this episodic screenplay is much more successful in its transference from the stage to the screen. Unlike PLAZA which presented its stories one after the other, CALIFORNIA plays out its four tales simultaneously. Two of them work and two of them fumble. The Fonda/Alda and the Smith/Caine segments are wonderful. They both rely on witty and tart banter and all four actors know how to punch out those barbs and Simon's writing is at its best here. The other two don't even rise to the level of an adequate TV sitcom. The Alda/Fonda and Caine/Smith segments are done by the film's last half our which makes the the final half hour near intolerable to watch. With James Coburn and Herb Edelman.