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Description:
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Neil Simon's bittersweet comedy, adapted from the Broadway hit, follows four separate stories of guests who've just checked into the swank Beverly Hills Hotel over the weekend of the Academy Awards gala. The four-part story line runs the gamut from touching introspection to outright slapstick. Bill and Hannah Warren (Alan Alda and Jane Fonda) are an angry divorced duo engaged in a nasty custody battle over their daughter. Marvin Michaels (Walter Matthau) is in town a day before his devoted wife (Elaine May) for his nephew's bar mitzvah when his brother sends him a present that is difficult to hide--a hooker. Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith) is an Oscar-nominated British actress in town for the Academy Awards with her husband, Sydney (Michael Caine), who happens to be gay. Competing doctors Willis Panama (Bill Cosby) and Chauncey Gump (Richard Pryor) have been busy containing calamities befalling them since they arrived and discovered they had to share a hotel room with their crestfallen wives. CALIFORNIA SUITE, in the capable hands of director Herbert Ross, is a simultaneously touching and hilarious vision of everyday people struggling to survive. (Smith, interestingly enough, won an Oscar for her role in the film.)
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