Four stories, one famous hotel
California Suite, released in 1978 and directed by Herbert Ross, is a film built like a hotel itself: several separate rooms, each with its own guests, its own arguments, and its own kind of comedy. The screenplay by Neil Simon, based on his stage play, follows four sets of visitors to the Beverly Hills Hotel over a weekend when the Academy Awards are in town. There is an English actress nominated for an Oscar, played by Maggie Smith, who won an Academy Award herself for the role; a Philadelphia businessman caught with a prostitute, played by Walter Matthau; two doctors on holiday with their wives, played by Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby; and, at the heart of the film for many viewers, a divorced couple fighting over their teenage daughter, played by Jane Fonda and Alan Alda.
Alda plays Bill Warren, a successful Hollywood screenwriter living the relaxed California life. He wears light clothes, he speaks easily, and he seems, at first glance, to have everything under control. His former wife, Hannah Warren, played by Fonda, arrives from New York in a fury. Their daughter Jenny, played by Dana Plato, has run away from home to live with her father, and Hannah has come to take her back. What follows is one of Neil Simon’s best marital duels: two intelligent, articulate, wounded people who know exactly how to hurt each other, and who still, underneath the insults, know each other better than anyone else in the world.
The pairing of Fonda and Alda is inspired. Fonda’s Hannah is sharp, driven, and exhausted by years of holding a family together largely on her own. Alda’s Bill is charming, evasive, and genuinely fond of his daughter, but he has a habit of turning serious things into jokes. Their scenes crackle because both actors understand that the argument is not really about who is the better parent in a simple sense. It is about two different ways of living: Hannah’s New York intensity against Bill’s California ease, her sense of duty against his belief that a child should be happy first. Simon gives them lines that are funny and painful at once, and Ross lets the actors play them at full speed.
A divorced couple who still know each other too well
The strength of the Bill and Hannah story is that neither character is a villain. Bill has not stolen his daughter. Jenny has chosen to come to him, partly because life with her mother feels like a pressure cooker and partly because her father offers freedom, sunshine, and a house where she is treated as a young adult rather than a problem to be managed. Hannah has not come to California out of pure spite. She is frightened for a teenage girl who has left home, and she is angry at a former husband who has too often been charming when he should have been present. Both of them are right about something, and both of them are wrong about something else, and that is why the story still works.
Alda is particularly good at the moments when Bill’s charm fails. He can deliver a Simon one-liner with the timing of a stage comedian, but he can also stop, look at Hannah, and show a man who realises that his easy manner has cost him something real. There is a scene in which the argument turns from custody to the marriage itself, to the years when they were young and hopeful and then slowly became strangers, and Alda plays it with a quiet sadness that lifts the comedy into something richer. He does not ask the audience to choose sides. He asks them to recognise a marriage that ended not because the people were cruel, but because they wanted different lives and could not find a way to want them together.
The supporting stories around Bill and Hannah give the film its variety. Maggie Smith and Michael Caine, as Diana Barrie and Sidney Cochran, provide the most purely comic pleasure, with Smith’s Oscar-nominated actress oscillating between triumph and panic as awards night approaches. Matthau and Elaine May provide farce, as a man caught in a compromising position tries to talk his way out of it with his wife and his brother. Pryor and Cosby, as two doctors who find themselves sharing a room, provide a gentler comedy of manners. Ross intercuts these stories without forcing them to connect, and the Beverly Hills Hotel itself becomes the link: a place where everyone is performing, whether for an awards audience or for a spouse.
Neil Simon, Herbert Ross, and the art of the anthology
California Suite belongs to a particular moment in American film comedy. Neil Simon was then the most successful playwright in the country, and his screenplays translated the rhythms of the stage to the screen with unusual fidelity. Herbert Ross, who had directed Simon’s The Sunshine Boys and The Goodbye Girl, understood how to let actors carry a scene without fussing over camera movement. The result is a film that feels theatrical in the best sense: it trusts dialogue, it trusts timing, and it trusts a great cast to make a hotel room feel like a world.
For Alda, the film arrived at the height of his M*A*S*H fame, and it showed audiences that his comic gifts worked just as well in a Neil Simon drawing room as in a surgical tent. Bill Warren is, in some ways, a cousin of Hawkeye Pierce: witty, humane, allergic to pomposity, and quick with a joke when feelings get too raw. But Bill is also more flawed. Hawkeye’s jokes are a defence against war. Bill’s jokes are sometimes a way of avoiding responsibility, and Alda does not hide that. He lets Bill be likeable and a little exasperating at once, which is a harder and more honest piece of acting than simply playing a charmer.
The film’s ending, like the play’s, does not tie everything up with a neat bow. Couples leave the hotel changed, but not transformed. Bill and Hannah reach a kind of truce about their daughter, not a reunion, and that restraint feels true to life. Simon understood that divorced parents do not stop being parents when they stop being married, and that a child can love both of them without solving their problems for them. Alda and Fonda play that understanding beautifully, with a final exchange that is less about winning than about letting go, just enough, for Jenny’s sake.
Watch California Suite for the Bill and Hannah scenes first, and then enjoy the whole hotel. Notice how Alda listens to Fonda, how he waits a beat before answering, and how his smile fades when the joke no longer works. It is a masterclass in screen comedy that is also, quietly, a drama about family, and it remains one of the finest showcases of Alda’s gifts as a light comedian with a serious heart.