Maggie Smith stole this film (and won a second Oscar®) with a brief silent bit roaming the halls of the Beverly Hills Hotel gleaning off trays of leftover room service food after the hotel kitchen had closed for the night. Nothing else in this stage-to-screen adaptation of Neil Simon’s L.A.-set four-part follow-up to his three-part NYC-set PLAZA SUITE/’71 gets as much across in such a fast & funny way. But under Herbert Ross’s smooth/pacey direction, and with Simon’s seamless restructuring of his play, it works far better as film than PLAZA SUITE did.* Alan Alda’s West Coast scripter and Jane Fonda’s East Coast news editor have the least to do as longtime ‘exes’ working out parental rights over a runaway teen daughter, their self-confessed brittle bantering going in circles. Bill Cosby & Richard Pryor are competitive doctors at loggerheads on a vacation from Hell with their wives. (Alas, their pratfall technique proves wanting.) Walter Matthau, in town for his nephew’s bar mitzvah, shows alarmingly funny physical shtick after his brother ‘gifts’ him with a hooker who won’t wake up when wife Elaine May gets in next morning. Her Cat Who Swallowed the Canary act impeccable. Then there’s antiques dealer Michael Caine, affectionate but queer husband to Smith who brings a wide, knowing range to Simon’s semi-serious mariage blanc clichés. Something both Dame Maggie and director Herbert Ross personally knew a thing or two about. It takes this section to a different level than the rest of the film, even when the writing fails to go as far under the surface as it thinks it does. Truth is, the Simon hit-to-miss ratio isn’t much different than other middling efforts. But Ross, one of the great B’way musical play ‘doctors,’ had a way of making the best out of whatever goods he was handed. A special talent that was both his gift and his curse.
CONTEST: A line about how great the Pacific Ocean once was anticipates a more famous line about the Atlantic Ocean from a film out two years later. Name the film, the line, and the Golden Age star who says it to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film you chose.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Simon had one more SUITE in him, the four-part LONDON SUITE which played OFF-B’way and was made as a tv movie. (Not seen here.) Turns out, PLAZA SUITE was also written as a four-parter, but the show’s stage director, Mike Nichols, thought it made the play run far too long and dropped its first episode. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/04/plaza-suite-1971.html
No comments:
Post a Comment