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the audience applauded

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Captivating movie !

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

even Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows with Gale Storm in 1956...could not make this a first-class play > yes, there are 4-5 hilarious one liners and some pretty funny slapstick but what's the fuss about? on 2nd thought, we can look at this 3 act play as a Matthau tour de force...although the flat, tired, dragged out proceedings make it at the level of a watchable 1971 TV movie. and the names Eisler and HUbley, while seeking to betray the dignified upper ten really are about very nervous blue collar folks, wondering if the expensive wedding may turn into a very expensive lunch, only > will the pampered 21 year old, having 2nd thoughts cowering in a upscale powder room, emerge before the next party arrives? many opportunities to really sell a scene are ruined by offhand gibberish - again, suggesting that the author compulsively threw this thing together...on a limo ride to a wedding.

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.

3 wonderful short stories are fused together in this 1971 film.The first story, which is the best, stars Walter Matthau and Maureen Stapleton as a couple whose marriage is failing and is spending their 23rd or 24th wedding anniversary there. Stapleton is terrific here as always. She shows great depth in going from a ditsy housewife to a woman hurt by the affair her husband has been having with his secretary.In the typical tradition of Simon, Stapleton wonders why her husband couldn't be more original since all men have affairs with their secretaries.Matthau stars in the second story as well but this time with Barbara Harris. As a Hollywood producer, he has come to N.Y. on business but has other things on his mind such as the seduction of Harris, a housewife from N.J. that he knew years ago when he lived in Tenafly. Matthau is quite funny here with his attempt to be suave and slick. While constantly changing her times of departure, Harris is hilarious while becoming quite inebriated from the liquor that Matthau serves up. Yet, this is the weakest of the 3 stories since you can't await for that bedroom scene that invariably takes place. Guess that Harris' marriage to Larry isn't as great as she made it out to be after all.In the 3rd segment, Matthau and Lee Grant star as a couple whose daughter is about to be married at the hotel. Trouble is she has wedding jitters so she locks herself in the bathroom. A very funny routine is establish by Matthau and Grant attempting to get her to come out and get married. It is only when her husband-to-be is summoned, he solves everything by telling her to "cool it." So, here we see the generation gap is action.The common link in the film is room 719 where the 3 stories take place. If only the walls could talk, they'd tell you not to miss this film.

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.