Herbert Ross (1978)
The faded-to-pink print screened by BFI may have detracted from the opening titles, which include David Hockney paintings of Los Angeles, but it wasn’t greatly damaging to the film as a whole. Scripted by Neil Simon, California Suite is propelled by words rather than images. Seeing the film again is a reminder of how prolific Simon was as a writer of movies for more than twenty years from the mid-1960s. His output comprised adaptations of his stage hits (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The Sunshine Boys, Chapter Two, Only When I Laugh, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues) and a smaller number of original screenplays (The Out of Towners, Murder By Death, The Goodbye Girl). There’s also The Heartbreak Kid, which Simon adapted from another writer’s novel. California Suite derives from four playlets, first staged in Los Angeles, then on Broadway, in 1976. Each self-contained piece features characters staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. (It’s the same arrangement as the earlier Plaza Suite, set in the Plaza Hotel in New York City.) Simon’s screenplay disguises the stage origins of these pieces perfunctorily. There are a few screen minutes of additional material to introduce each set of characters en route to the hotel. Once they’ve checked in, there’s a small amount of intercutting between the different guests – but not so much as to prevent three of the four stories being told sequentially and virtually without interruption. The remaining story – which involves two couples rowing among themselves, rather than a single husband and wife (or ex-husband and ex-wife) – isn’t allowed the same narrative prominence and always seems like filler. The plays are opened out in only a technical sense. Herbert Ross and Neil Simon decide occasionally that the viewer needs a change of scenery even though there’s no justification in the script for this: the argument that Simon has written carries on regardless of the new locale. This happens mostly in the ‘Visitors from New York’ piece. At one point, the two antagonists are sitting in a restaurant and Ross cuts abruptly to them in swimsuits on the beach, where they continue to snipe at each other. The woman in this pairing is so determined to dispute anything the man says that it’s hard to imagine how they agreed to go swimming and sunbathing.
In ‘Visitors from New York’, Hannah Warren (Jane Fonda), a workaholic Newsweek editor, has arrived from Manhattan to reclaim her teenage daughter from Hannah’s ex-husband, Bill (Alan Alda), a successful screenwriter living in Los Angeles, to whom the girl has fled. In ‘Visitors from London’, a famous British stage actress, Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith), has been nominated for an Oscar and is in town for the ceremony with her antique dealer and, it transpires, actively homosexual husband, Sidney Cochran (Michael Caine). In ‘Visitors from Philadelphia’, middle-aged businessman Marvin Michaels (Walter Matthau) has come to LA to attend his nephew’s bar-mitzvah; Marvin’s wife, Millie (Elaine May), will be joining him for the celebration the next day. The ‘Visitors from Chicago’ are two doctors (Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor) and their wives (Sheila Frazier and Gloria Gifford), on vacation together. Neil Simon is notorious for non-stop combative dialogue and in two of the pieces he finds in the characters concerned some kind of pretext for this inveterate tendency. The super-tense Hannah Warren needs to win the argument with her ex-husband every time she speaks; and he appears to enjoy winding her up – both as a means of defence and to conceal his pity for her. Diana Barrie and Sidney Cochran (also an actor before he went into antiques) are creatures of the theatre – people who are popularly supposed to be bitchy and rivalrous and to exchange smart one-liners offstage as well as on. Occasionally, Neil Simon’s Just A Minute-style writing (no hesitations anyway) nearly collapses under the strain of its relentlessness. The demanding Hannah Warren would never allow herself to get away with a verbally sloppy description of her daughter as ‘a bright girl with an intelligent mind’. Back in her hotel room after seeing the Academy Award go elsewhere, Diana Barrie, a first-time nominee, laments that ‘I’m always like this when I lose an Oscar’.
The battle in ‘Visitors from New York’ between Hannah’s determined wit and Bill’s easy wit doesn’t come off because the two actors aren’t equally matched. Alan Alda isn’t able to combine sharpness and relaxedness in quite the right way, while Jane Fonda is almost excessively expert and devastating in a role that’s too thin for her talents. The ‘Visitors from London’ piece became famous because Maggie Smith did win an Oscar (as Best Supporting Actress) for her performance in it. The Academy Awards satire is broad, to say the least, and, for an Oscars nerd like me, full of inaccurate details. (Perhaps Neil Simon, who, surprisingly, has never won an Oscar, was already miffed and merely wanted to get his own back.) Diana Barrie, renowned for her work at the National Theatre, especially in Pinter plays, has been nominated for her role in a daft romantic comedy. You sense that Ross and Simon think casting a distinguished stage actress in the role of Diana confirms the truth of their conceit although Maggie Smith’s three nominations from the Academy, before California Suite, were for playing characters created by Shakespeare, Muriel Spark and Graham Greene (and she won for her portrait of Spark’s Jean Brodie.) Still, there’s no doubt that Maggie Smith’s partnership with Michael Caine is much the best one in the film. Their exchanges are, for all their classy rancour, obvious. So too is the revelation of the underlying sadness of the couple’s relationship. But Smith’s theatrical verve and Caine’s witty underplaying are precise and satisfyingly complementary.
In ‘Visitors from Philadelphia’, Marvin’s brother fixes him up with a hooker who, after downing a bottle of tequila, can’t be roused into consciousness the morning after – when Marvin’s wife is about to arrive. Walter Matthau is so comfortable with this material that Marvin’s panic is very intermittent – it seems to attack only when Matthau spots an opportunity for a comic highlight. Elaine May is determinedly unexpected in the clichéd role of Millie, a morally conservative, good-hearted worrywart. May radiates calmness and shrewdness throughout; although this is a refreshing and coherent characterisation, it contradicts the premise of the piece. The four-hander is a disaster. The two doctors and their wives are at each other’s throats from the word go. As a result, their mixed doubles tennis match isn’t the explosion of pent-up tensions that it should be – just more of the same. Rather as the names of their respective characters imply, Bill Cosby (Dr Willis Panama) is believable as a medic in a way that Richard Pryor (Dr Chaucey Gump) isn’t. Since Cosby is also unpleasant and bullies Pryor, you don’t feel the two men are equally deserving of their eventual misfortunes – you dislike one and feel sorry for the other. And because the comedy in ‘Visitors from Chicago’ is more physical than verbal and consequently much weaker (it goes against the grain of Neil Simon’s talents as a writer), the effect is inadvertently racist. It’s as if Herbert Ross has seen fit to leave the smart lines and the sensitive emotions to the white actors and have the black ones, even though they’re playing professional couples, stick with broad clowning.
4 January 2015
