Plaza Suite

Central Park South is the setting of this film version of the Neil Simon hit Broadway play that gets a faithful film adaption that is both character driven and a comedy of the lack of American manners. A business man reveals to his wife on their 30th anniversary that he's been having an affair; A movie star meets an old girlfriend for chat and a hopeful rendezvous; A frustrated father of the bride deals with his nervous daughter. The women all face their situations with typical Neil Simon humor, a bit of bitterness. an overabundance of vodka stingers and brittle cynicism mixed with love and embarrassment. Walter Matthau plays all three men with different looks-one dark haired with a mustache, one a California dyed blonde and one salt and peppered with an expensive tux. The women were three of the most popular stage and screen actresses of the time and all superb if at least one a bit annoying in her clinging manner. That honor goes to Maureen Stapleton, too loving, a bit cloying and way too chatty. Dealing with the news that her 30 year marriage may be on the rocks (plus the presence of anchovies in her room service order that she particularly requested she not get. Louise Sorel is the secretary who pops by with paperwork which leads to the revelation of the six month fling he's been trying to end. This segment ends with a bittersweet conclusion and while Stapleton's character could be a bit too much, I felt sorry for her in many different ways. Broadway musical star Barbara Harris is the vodka stinger guzzling former girlfriend of movie lothario Matthau's, a station wagon wife and mother who is impressed by the name- dropping Matthau who is spoofing Hollywood pretty boys trying to remain glamorous past their prime. This is the least interesting of the three segments because the motivations are simply one dimensional and the characters aren't fully drawn out. This leaves the best for last, a wedding segment with Matthau sounding very much like Archie Bunker and Lee Grant as the frustrated wife and mother. Grant is excellent, giving the best of the female performances even though it was Stapleton who ended up with a Golden Globe nomination. It's easy to see why Matthau was so popular at this time and remained a leading man in spite of looking like a character performer. In spite of his gruffness, there is something really likable about him. He reminds me of the crazy uncle who amuses the kiddies while annoying the adults. Small moments work better here than some of the bigger moments. Some familiar faces add on to the character driven plays including familiar soap faces Jordan Charney and Augusta Dabney.

Neil Simon's three playlet show Plaza Suite turns into a tour de force for Walter Matthau as he stars in all three which become funnier as the film progresses. The first one pairs Matthau with Maureen Stapleton, the two have rented a suite at the Plaza for their 23rd or is it their 24th anniversary. They have differing views on that and more than they realize. Matthau's such a romantic he's brought some of his work with him. When Louise Sorel from the office brings him some revisions it's apparent it's not just his work that needs revising. This one had some laughs, but strictly of the ironic nature. Matthau is opposite Barbara Harris in the next one. He plays a man from Tenafly, New Jersey who has sought fame and fortune in the west as Horace Greeley advised. West in the 20th century meant Hollywood and now he's a hot producer with all the perogatives of that breed. Harris is a girl he left behind and one gets the impression back in the day she would not have given him the time of day. But now Matthau has mastered the skill of the casting couch and he lays out a campaign to win this now married New Jersey housewife. As for Harris it's amazing when you attach a celebrity status to someone how your view might change. Best of the three by far is the last with Matthau and Lee Grant as the parents of a girl having her wedding at the Plaza Hotel. The bride to be their daughter Mimsy is having wedding jitters and locks herself in the bathroom. Grant tries and fails to talk her out and then sends for daddy. Matthau is gradually seeing bankruptcy as the bills for a wedding at the Plaza pile up and things don't go quite according to plan. But when this crisis occurs Matthau pulls all the stops out with one of the funniest performances in his career. He does one of the greatest bits of overacting in a role that had to have it. With all he tries and all the indignities he suffers in his attempts to get Mimsy out from the john you have to see what does it in the end. On stage Plaza Suite had Don Porter and Maureen Stapleton playing all of the main roles in the three playlets. This film is a must for Walter Matthau fans. You will never see him funnier, not in The Odd Couple, not in The Fortune Cookie, not in anything.

Give Walter Matthau a script by Neil Simon, and the results were often golden. But give Matthau three Simon scripts, in the form of this adaptation of three one-act plays set in a room at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel and starring Matthau in widely different roles, and all you get is a harsh clanging sound. Two problems dog the movie. One is the opening act. Here Matthau plays a preoccupied businessman coldly dismissive of his anxious, aging wife Karen (Maureen Stapleton). It represents a stab at serious drama by Simon, with a few unfunny one-liners thrown in to offer some wan chuckles. Matthau's character barks about the roast beef having too much fat. Stapleton, meanwhile, is all feral desperation, eyes bulging and eager to please, practically begging her husband for a moment's attention as she worries about the state of their marriage. "I like to put your eyedrops in," she says at one point in their labored to-and-fro. "It's the only time lately you look at me." The "can-this-marriage-be-saved" storyline doesn't work, because we don't care about him and can only pity her, especially as it develops and he drops a bomb on her you see coming five minutes in. "I'm attached to you!" she wails. Stapleton is a chore to watch here, and director Arthur Hiller is no help as he magnifies her every overplayed emotion with long, tight close-ups. After that, you get the lighter pieces, but like Moonspinner's review here notes, you aren't really in the mood to enjoy them after that opening act from hell. This brings up the second problem: Simon's not much funnier here when he's trying to be. Story #2 has Matthau playing a Hollywood producer picking up an old flame from Tenafly, played by Barbara Harris. Harris is a good comic actor and plays her part well here, but there's nothing much to this story, unless it's the novelty of Matthau in a blond wig. Early on we see the producer going through his little black book, with the idea that Harris's character is just another time-filler to him. But later, he seems to get serious, telling her he sleeps on a 360-degree bed but that 180 degrees of it are empty. Simon never bothers to explain what the character really thinks. She, meanwhile, just gets drunk, which is where much of the comedy comes, along with her curiosity about his show-business life. "Do you know Frank Sinatra?" she asks. The segment peters out after many show-biz gag lines and maybe one or two light chortles. The final tale puts Matthau in a gray wig and tails as the father of a bride who won't come out of her bathroom to get married in the Plaza Hotel ballroom. He worries about the cost of everything: "There's 200 dollars of cocktail frankfurters getting cold downstairs." Mother-of-the-bride Lee Grant begs her daughter to think of the social shame of a lockaway bride. "Come out of the bathroom now," she pleads. "If you want, I'll have it annulled next week." Contrived as it is, and it's very much so with Matthau taking a walk on a ledge to try climbing through the bathroom window and battling pigeons instead, this is the one sequence with any hard laughs or energy to it, and the only time Matthau seems engaged. Simon doesn't know what to do with the situation, though, and it shows, with a left-field resolution that feels like a shrug. I guess the point of the picture, beyond maximizing the use of a single cheap set, has something to do with taking in the dicey state of man-woman relations circa 1971. Simon apparently didn't change the script much from the stage play, a hit on Broadway, but what might have seemed novel and engaging in live theater comes off claustrophobic and cold here. The stories lurch from melodrama to contrived sitcom humor, while Matthau's usual irascible energy is lost under an uncharacteristic absence of charisma. The end result is a movie that fails to deliver much of anything, and takes too long doing it.

Had the entire film been as funny as the last segment, I would have rated it higher. The first 2 were full of dull, sexy, or bitchy dialogue, but the last was a real ripper. The distraught mom and the overwrought dad had me in the floor with their idiotic antics. I don't care for Neil Simon comedies; at least the ones I've seen.

Although there are marvelous performances here, it seems a little boring, but hey, just a little. All of the stars act great in this picture; the script is funny, and I think that´s it. I would pay at least a buck for this one, maybe two. But if you haven´t seen it, you should.

I couldn't relate to that other review at all. We're talking about a seriously entertaining film here, I'm not sure exactly what was boring about it. The hilarity was pretty much non-stop, all the roles were delightfully impeccable, and I doubt that the writing could be flawed at all. I can see how the recommendation below points towards "The Royal Tenenbaums" too, obviously the comedy here-in takes a certain understanding to fully sink in. Not to mention the brilliant poignancy it leaves behind. "Boring"... feh. That's someone who needs a good hard drink.

Neil Simon possess a gift, he succeeded to dig in the human relationship and go out all the negative the fears, the wrongs and the frustration with the laughter and the funny but all of this whole of blue. It's Blue because his characters are aware to own wrong but at the same time are condemned and all things that they do is useless and worst because this is their nature. The flick narrate 3 tales acclimatized in a Plaza Suite, all the action is concentrated in this room and so all the goodness is addressed on the leading players a wonderful Matthau that play all of 3 characters for the stories. In the first a wife discovered the betrayal of the husband in their 23rd anniversary, in the second a famous Hollywood producer try to seduce one his ex-girlfriend to youngness years, now happiness married, and in the end the problem of a surly couple in the wedding-day of the un-security daughter. Many laughter but each of these with the better retro-taste and melancholy, the three characters compared themselves with own wrong, deny its, scream, fighting but continued in the same wrong. In the end all the things going as must going to damage of the their actions but in every end solutions there is something to good tuck known take you. Wonderful actor trial for Walter Matthau, the cinema world had lost many in his dead, he is a complete actor able to through the mimic facial a express many feelings and players each kind of flick. My rate is 8.

I just watched this movie for the first time. And I have re-watched the first "act" a number of times now. I never gave Maureen Stapleton much of a thought, frankly. Until I watched this movie. I like this movie very much. It will be one of my "go-to's,"- those pictures that I can always watch and always enjoy. Matthau is effective throughout. Act 2 is played quite broadly, and it's a fun segment, but the weakest. Act 3 is (because I can't think of a better descriptor) conventionally funny - it follows the familiar pattern, and it's very good. But the best is the first act where the real focus is Stapleton. From the moment we first see her, she looks real. I wager that most people who watch this movie knows someone that is her character. Watch her closely, as she puts nuance into every scene - the expressions on her face, the gestures. There's a scene where she sits down on a bed, back to the camera as Matthau leaves the room. It's followed by her talking to herself. It's a brilliant bit of acting, that feels so real, and struck an emotional chord in me. I gave this an "8." If I had to grade each act separately, it would be: Act 1 - 10; Act 2 - 7; Act 3 - 8 Watch and enjoy.

Neil Simon kind of owned the 1970's/80's. Either he had a new play coming out or one of his old ones was being made into a movie. I saw many of them in one incarnation or another -- 'The Odd Couple', 'Brighton Beach Memoirs', 'Biloxi Blues', 'California Suite', etc. -- but giving them another look decades later I'd have to say my patience with Mr. Simon's work has worn about as thin as it can go. Simply put, his characters never shut up. When they leave the stage and venture onto film, this becomes a problem. 'Plaza Suite' is an excellent example of the overly-talky, stagnant result obtained from an unimaginatively filmed play. Walter Matthau, a Simon staple, plays three roles, in three separate stories taking place in the same seventh-floor suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Maureen Stapleton is so annoying as Matthau's wife in the first segment that I found myself wanting to marry her just so I could have the pleasure of leaving her. The second vignette is so dull I almost turned it off. In the third, Matthau's character climbs out the window of the suite onto a ledge. As I was thinking back to my time living in New York, doubting the fact that there is in fact a ledge at the seventh-floor level, the film obligingly cuts to a shot of a man on a ledge at the Plaza… obviously at the fourth floor, and there are none higher. Thanks, movie… saved me Googling it. What arrogant writer would not only state a falsehood about a well-known landmark, but then show that what he has just stated is untrue? Neil Simon, folks; owner of the 70's and 80's. If he wants a ledge on the 7th floor of the Plaza, they'd better start building one for him. He's Neil Simon. There is, naturally, an exception to every rule. I enjoyed 'Murder By Death' very much, and I even think I like it better now than I did when it first came out. Stellar cast, excellent writing, checked off all the boxes. 'The Goodbye Girl' is another one that holds up very well. I also have a place in my heart for one of Simon's lesser-known works, 'I Ought to be in Pictures'. But 'Plaza Suite' and its ilk have seen their day. Mr. Simon is a prolific writer, but his writing is repetitive and many of his characters seem one-dimensional in this day and age. If you have the chance to see a local community theater do 'Plaza Suite', you might enjoy it in a retro kind of way. Don't bother with the film adaptation.

The old cliche applies to this brilliantly acted and wonderfully scripted film; they don't make them like this any more. The comedy, the intensity, the emotion is all in the dialogue and in the performances of the leading ladies and of course, that of Walter Matthau as the three lead male characters. The dialogue crackles from start to finish. I don't think a script like this would ever get the green light in Hollywood today. Too much talk, not enough drama, nothing that really happens. In many ways it's more like a French film. Walter Matthau is from that wonderful generation of fifties and sixties comic actors who could be over-the-top without overracting (Peter Sellers, Phil Silvers, Tony Hancock etc.). He manages to do this whilst never losing his grip on his characters and always managing to surprise with his subtle facial expressions and the comic timing of his movement. Great performances and a great film.