Four Academy Award winners share the spotlight in this all-star comedy along with some of the great funny men and women of the 20th Century. Walter Matthau, Maggie Smith, Jane Fonda and Michael Caine all took home Oscars (Matthau one, the rest two each, one of them for this), and they are joined by Academy Award nominated writer Elaine May, comic legends Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, TV and stage legend Alan Alda, as well as supporting performances by Herb Edelman, Gloria Gifford, Sheila Frazier and Dana Plato. The four vignettes are a mixture of bitchy drawing room comedy, riotous farce, War of the Roses like battles and one misfire that surprisingly did not result in homicide or mass suicide. It's all from the pen of Neil Simon that this mixture of great and not so great plots and dialog spring forth, but in the end, it's what's great that springs the rating up higher, while two fall in the middle and one, well, not so much.The Cosby/Pryor scenes are the worst, unfunny and violent and often cruel in nature. Two couples (Cosby with Frazier, Pryor with Gifford) spring for a deluxe vacation at the Beverly Hills Hotel and end up fighting amongst themselves. Not light-hearted arguing, but bone breaking slap downs. It's surprisingly humorless in spite of the two male stars and left me cold, not just because of the racial stereotypes involving black couples being vindictive and violent, but not even Three Stooges type violence which it strives for. The two wives seem too far sophisticated to allow themselves to get involved in such ghetto mentality activities. The Walter Matthau sketch is moderately funny as his brother Herb Edelman (Stan, "Golden Girls") sets him up with a younger woman, and his efforts to hide her when his wife Elaine May arrives. The chemistry between Matthau and May is perfect, and Matthau and Edelman really do seem like brothers. It's a 70's "Three's Company" sitcom like scenario with Matthau obviously Mr. Roper and May obviously Mrs. Roper, and in spite of some scattered laughs, seems often to be forced. Denise Galik (best known to me as Karen Wexler's mother, Rhonda, on "General Hospital") is the sexy babe Edelman springs forth, her efforts for a rendezvous with Matthau amusingly fouled up.This leads me to the War of the Roses like pairing of Jane Fonda and Alan Alda as a divorced couple fighting over their daughter (Plato). It is perhaps the most serious of the four sketches, with Fonda a strong, powerful businesswoman from New York and Alda a screenwriter whom Plato wants to live with. While the idea of two together seems a surefire match, it isn't with Fonda seemingly trying to overpower the easy going Alda. It's the most theatrical seeming of the group of stories, probably better played on a one room set on stage than in the locations where it was moved to for this movie. Fonda and Alda seem like they might have been better paired a decade ago, because her humorless character really doesn't sparkle on screen with his very likable character.That brings me to the best of the best, the Maggie Smith/Michael Caine Academy Award sequence. She's an Oscar nominee, complaining about "Glenda Jackson being nominated every year", and upset that after many great dramatic performances, she got nominated for a comedy. When Smith and Caine are on-screen, you long for the focus to remain on them and not move back to any of the other three. While this again could have been Smith eating Caine alive, the opposite is true. Certainly, Smith's bitchy lines towards her bi-sexual husband Caine are outrageously funny and biting, but he makes being her straight man one of the funniest elements in the film. Smith becomes the British Tallulah Bankhead as her snarky comments rip to the core, and she deservedly won her second Oscar for her second Neil Simon film, having already taken one liners to the heights in "Murder By Death".Multi-story films with unrelated characters are always a mixed bag, as it is obvious some will work, but some won't. It's obvious who was having fun and who was just doing it for the paycheck and who considered it a challenge. Herbert Ross, a master at directing film versions of Broadway plays (many of them Simon's, a few of them Simon's original works as well), is the perfect choice to guide most of the cast to success. Perhaps the weakest segment could have been toned down as it seems that what worked on stage just came off as obnoxious on screen, but that's a minor issue in an overall fun confection of comedy talent with one that stands out as a gem and one of the great couplings in film that Lunt and Fontanne from beyond must have envied.

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

Four separate stories (all written by Neil Simon)that take place at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There's brittle sarcastic Hannah Warren (Jane Fonda) meeting with her divorced husband Bill (Alan Alda) over custody of their child Jenny (a very young Dana Plato). As with most Simon scripts the one-liners fly fast and furious. Some of it is funny but Fonda's character is far too mean and Alda is obviously uneasy with the dialogue for it to work.Then there's Oscar-nominated actress Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith) and her bisexual husband Sidney Cochran (Michael Caine). She's agonizing over attending the Academy Awards and he tries to calm her. These two are very at ease with the comedy and drama and their story is easily the best in the film.Then there's Marvin Michael (Walter Matthau) there for a bar mitzvah. He arrives the night before his wife Millie (Elaine May) shows up. His brother sends a prostitute to his room--and she passes out and can't wake up before his wife arrives. Matthau is fun but May seems uneasy.The worst story is of two couples--Dr. Willis Panama (Bill Cosby) and his wife Bettina (Sheila Frazer) with Dr. Chauncey (Richard Pryor) with his wife Lola (Gloria Gifford). There story is basically non-stop unfunny and violent slapstick. Seeing two talented comedians like Pryor and Cosby fighting and biting each other isn't funny--just embarrassing. Even worse their wives are totally ignored! A real mixed bag here. The best joke comes from what happened after the movie. Smith won an Oscar for her acting here and her character in the movie didn't get the Oscar! Also why Smith got the award is beyond me. She's good but this is hardly an Oscar worthy performance. So, all in all, it's OK. I give it a 7.

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 ****