California Suite

California Suite (1978) is a Neil Simon comedy-drama worth a watch online on iFILM. It never leaves a single Beverly Hills hotel, yet four separate stories unfold across its suites at once, the guests barely crossing paths with one another.

A Hollywood actress arrives for Oscar night with her English husband, whose attentions may not run her way (Maggie Smith and Michael Caine). A long-divorced couple bicker over their grown daughter in rapid New York cross-talk (Jane Fonda and Alan Alda). Two old friends and their wives turn a vacation into a parade of injuries and wreckage (Walter Matthau, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby). Director Herbert Ross cuts between these vignettes, swinging from delicate drama to broad farce and back.

Simon adapted the screenplay from his own Broadway play, and the dialogue is the real draw: fast, barbed, occasionally cruel. As the acid-tongued Diana, Maggie Smith picked up the Best Supporting Actress Oscar — playing, of all things, an actress who loses one. Stream California Suite (1978) online on iFILM.