Chapter Two (1979)

Most people know by now that Simon was a recent widower when he met Marsha Mason, herself a recent divorcee, during auditions for his play The Good Doctor. He wrote the 1977 play Chapter Two, a none-too-loosely based account of this experience, and it had a healthy run on Broadway for a couple of years before its inevitable film adaptation. Mason played – herself, essentially – in the lead role as Jeannie, and  she managed to get her third Oscar nomination for Best Actress out of it, her second from a Simon play (with a third on the way, only two years later). James Caan took the role of George (Simon), with Valarie Harper and Joe Bologna rounding out the cast as George’s brother and Jeannie’s best friend, respectively.

The film picks up nearly immediately after the death of George’s wife; as he returns home from a vacation indented, unsuccessfully, to make him forget the past, his brother, Leo, tries to get him to move on, attempting to set him up with a series of dates to this end. After one horrific date too many, George puts

the kibosh on Leo’s ill-fated efforts at matchmaking, but due to an accidental dialing he manages to clumsily set something up with Jeannie, whom Leo had met via Faye, an old friend (and possible love interest). After a five-minute “trial date” George and Jeannie hit it off smashingly, with a whirlwind romance that turns into an equally whirlwind marriage. Even Leo is concerned by little bro’s speedy and potentially reckless driving – a fear that soon becomes realized when George breaks down during their honeymoon over the loss of his previous wife. Jeannie obsequiously tries to mend his heart, only enraging him further with her failure to challenge his emotions. After she discovers Faye’s affair with married Leo, she turns a corner, and works on repairing her own marriage – with ultimate success. 

Chapter Two is probably the closest yet Simon has come to a gimmick-free, pure and simple adult romance (unless you count the wife’s death a gimmick; I just saw it as backstory). And by and large, it works – maybe inspired by Woody Allen’s more adult turn in 1977’s Annie Hall, Simon here writes from his funny bone and heart, crafting a romantic comedy-drama that really was ahead of its time: later writers James Brooks and Cameron Crowe would further popularize the genre, but this is certainly one of its forbears. Particularly good is the film’s first act, in which George is set up as a deeply wounded man – arriving from the airport to his empty house, reminders of his dearly departed all over the place, with a deep heartache and a host of unanswered question that always seem to accompany the sudden, tragic loss of a loved one. When Mason enters the picture, she’s a gust of fresh air, and we want so desperately for them to be together. 

The midsection of the film shows the two giddily in love, and even though it’s not bad, I was reminded of Syndey Pollack, in an interview once explaining how this is always he hardest part of a love story to write. “The falling in love is easy – there’s action and a rooting interest there. The falling out of isn’t hard either – action and strong emotion. But the middle is the worst, because you gotta have something for them to do besides feeding each other strawberries and running through fields together.” Well, they aren’t exactly running through fields here, but they aren’t doing much either, and even Simon’s top notch dialogue is not as razor sharp as it could be.
 

And then comes their breakup, and it seems here that Simon is overcompensating. Without sounding too callous, it does seem that Caan’s mourning is a bit contrived; I really just wanted to put my hand through the screen, slap him in the face and say, "Get over it.” Mason seems to agree (minus the slap), but every time she intellectualizes it, he returns volley with more intellectualization, until the whole argument becomes so abstract it’s hard to get a handle on what, exactly, they’re feeling. Then comes Mason’s big third-act monologue, the one no doubt that got her the Oscar nod. She acts he heart out on it, but unfortunately it’s as overacted as it is overwritten. An editor should’ve come in and told both Simon and Mason it’s not a therapy session. Yeah, right – whose name is above the title? 

But all told it’s certainly not bad, and any Neil Simon during his prime is better than just about anything else they’re putting on the screen nowadays. The subplot, involving Faye and Leo’s affair, is a nice diversion from the main story, but that’s about it: it doesn’t really fit in too terribly well. And Valerie Harper (Faye) is, I hate to say it, physically unappealing here – she must’ve been dieting and really working out at the time, but to excess, so she looks both undernourished and overbuffed. I hate to sound like Rex Reed here, but it did distract me. Well, at least Marsha Mason looked hot, which is something if you read my Goodbye Girl review.

Simon closes the 70s with this one, his most fertile decade. An appropriate cap for the man who advanced romantic comedy, on screen and stage, more than any single individual. 

Simon’s in Simon’s life: obvious if you’ve been reading this review. 

Rating: ***1/2

 

California Suite (1978)

Neil Simon only took two years to bring the second of his “suite” plays, California Suite, to the screen after a healthy year-long Broadway run (that’s a long time for a play). Featuring an all-star cast, it opened in November to modest praise and box-office, but may be best remembered as an answer to a trivia question: who was the only person to win and Oscar for playing an Oscar loser? It’s Maggie Smith, for her role in this movie, as a British film star in town for the Oscars, nervous as all hell, and not just about the ceremony.

Simon, as well as other playwrights, must enjoy working in a shorter form, as he does here, anthologizing four stories not quite weighty enough for feature length but perfect in this form. And some of these stories, in their snapshots of lives with plenty of history, joyful, tragic and everything in between, reminded me much of the similar bittersweet vignettes penned by the likes of Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor and O. Henry. It’s no stretch to say that two of these stories, “The Visitors from London” and “The Visitors from New York,” surely rank among the finest of Simon’s work. 

The Londoners are Maggie Smith, playing an Academy-Award nominated British actress (a la Glenda Jackson or Vanessa Redgrave) and her husband, played by Michael Caine. Her nerves are shot waiting for the big Oscar ceremony, so she starts hitting the sauce early  - a bit too early for hubby’s taste, and through their conversation we get the sense that he’s more caretaker than better-half; this is explained through a few casual hints regarding his potential homosexuality, and finally realize theirs is a marriage of convenience – and façade. “I’ve never loved any woman more than I loved you,” and she responds, “You know how to hurt a woman!” Simon masterfully withholds key lines of dialogue, tippng us off about the truth of their union only gradually, like a slowly-peeled onion. Their final moment, an act of lovemaking in which she, after losing the Oscar, implores him to keep his eyes open and see her for a change, is perhaps Simon’s most poignant coda – and the story itself is a masterpiece.
  

Coming in second is “Visitors from New York,” in another fractious pairing, this time as Alan Alda and Jane Fonda as ex-spouses currently at odds over their daughter, who’s just migrated back to dad on the West Coast after a long unhappiness on the East. Fonda’s character is stubborn as steel, secretly envious of Alda’s healthier, and ostensibly happier, lifestyle, and her disposition is made al the worse when it looks like the daughter will stay with dad. So much backstory here, replete with closeted skeletons and deep pangs of regret – all masquerading as humor, attempted and otherwise. And Fonda is positively magnificent here, just as deserving an Oscar nomination as Smith was, I a role that couldn’t be anymore opposite than Corrie Bratter. She’s all poise and dignity, just a front to mask layers of frailties and insecurities. 

Walter Matthau and Elaine may star in the third segment, a broader, alleviating  story to balance the previous drama, about a man in town for his nephew’s bar mitzvah, and the repercussions that ensue when he, and ultimately his wife, discover a naked, unconscious woman in bed with him the next morning. It’s a pretty funny, Blake Edwards-esque comedy of attempted cover up, with Matthau stealing the show as a man terrified of an infidelity he doesn’t eve remember committing. (And for some reason his glasses are a pricelessly hilarious comic prop!) May is fine as well, with a dénouement as nice as it is unexpected (thank god, after the first two bits).    

The fourth story is really sort of the glue holding the other three together, interspersed throughout the film (it’s all cleverly structured, with all four intercut to some degree, and the current story stressed the most and each dropping off when concluded). "The Visitors from Chicago” gives us Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as doctors, connected as brothers-in-law, who start the trip mildly disagreeing and ending up literally beating the s**t out of each other. Things get worse and worse after a series of mishaps ranging from just annoying to downright life-threatening (car accidents, tennis injuries, glass impailments, etc.) It’s a hoot to see comic geniuses Pryor and Cosby (in their only film together) at each other’s throats, perhaps mirroring their real-life relationship. But the comedy of errors at times gets pretty ugly very fast – at one point they cut trapped under a truck and need the Jaws of Life to get out. Ummm, sorry Neil, but this ain’t exactly a kneeslapper. Still, both comedians get to read better dialogue here than in most of their other films, and that’s enough not to be too tough on it.

By and large, a good time to be had in Simon’s take on the Golden State, with pointed observations about the culture. No, not as sharp as Woody Allen was in his merciless Annie Hall, but Simon’s milder touch still yields some stirring drama here, as well as the expected laugh factor.

 

Rating: ****

The Good Doctor (1978)

It seems that most great contemporary talents have, at some point in their careers, been such in awe of their inspirational forebears that they feel compelled to emulate then in some way or another, usually calling their product “tribute” or “ode.” This sort of dressing-up mostly applies to writers or directors in the performing arts – look at Woody Allen, who filmed his elegies Interiors and Memories for Ingrid Bergman and Federico Fellini, respectively. And Neil Simon, sometime in the early 70s, must’ve looked back to his gods, namely Anton Chekov, and written The Good Doctor, which opened on Broadway in 1973.

In 1978, the PBS series Great Performances aired a videotaped presentation of the play, and it’s certainly a good-looking product, transcending the familiar camera-nailed-to-floor approach with strikingly distinct set pieces and fluid editing to overcome the staginess. Only six actors – Richard Chamberlin, Marsha Mason, Bob Dishy, Lee Grant, Ed Asner, Gary Dontzig – occupy a myriad of characters inhabiting ten Chekov stories, all connected by Chamberlin, as Chekov himself, introducing them, and musing about the writing craft in the process. The stories are:

“The Sneeze” A skittishly overnurotic clerk sneezes on his boss with a myriad of repercussions, taken to a ludicrous, and dark, extreme.

 

“The Governess” A woman gradually cheats her governness out of a month’s salary, all as a test of her assertiveness.

“The Seduction” A self-proclaimed lothario explains to the audience how he seduces married women, all with the assistance of their oblivious husbands.

“The Drowned Man” A vagrant coaxes a gentleman into paying him to simulate a drowning.

“The Audition” A woman auditioning for Chekov himself bends over backwards to please, before acting a showstopping scene from his Three Sisters.

“A Defenseless Creature” A penniless yet persistent woman manages to extract money from an obstinate banker.

“The Arrangement” A father arranges for his 19-year-old son to lose his virginity at a brothel.

At first it may be difficult to detect Simon’s hand in this collection – he’s writing in the style of his turn-of-the century Russian inspiration. But after a bit, you start to hear it – in the craft, witty wordplay, the recurring comic motifs, the exaggerated

situations, and self-unaware neurotic characters clashing with more grounded, often exasperated ones. It’s all there, sans the one liners and ethnic idioms. But writing in this context he gets to explore the pathos of the human condition a little deeper. Many of the characters here have darker sides, and the brevity of their stories gives them a feel of fablism (a number of them are full of irony; Chekov as a short-story writer is sort of like the Russian O Henry). Certainly a full-length play like his would be a downer; as vignettes it’s just right.

 

The actors is superb here, and it’s great to see them in a play, the most basic of all performing media, and often the most emotionally engaging. Chamberlain plays several roles but as Chekov, looping it all together, he sums up the play’s theme – that the writing process is a slow, tortured one, but it sustains life – it needs to be done for not simply happiness but survival. These stories he tells illuminate the point to all existence, as life-endowing for the creator as for the patron. Marsha Mason is the leading female, playing four or five roles as different as they are striking. Perhaps the most emotionally powerful one comes in a vignette Simon wrote just for this presentation: “The Audition,” about a nervous woman auditioning for a playwright. Mason met future husband Simon during auditions for Doctor, so added this story as a gift for his wife, and what a gift. Mason (as the auditioner) performs the roles of all three sisters in Three Sisters, and we’re just as mesmerized as Chekov is. 

 

Also noteworthy: “The Governess,” a sharp allegory about those who rule, and those who are ruled by others. It’s riveting but disturbing stuff. “A Defenseless Creature” features Lee Grant as a poor madwoman entreating a cold banker for money, in a tour de force of lunacy…. and ultimate efficacy. And the final story, “The Arrangement,” is a fond remembrance of how the narrator’s father took him to a brothel “to become a man.” Sounds tawdry, but it’s a rather touching and sad salute to bygone days, and the irrevocable loss of innocence.

I’ll pay Simon the ultimate contribution for his efforts: it makes me want to read Chekov. This is a wonderful work.

Stage in Simon’s life: his present era, worshipping at the altar of dramaturgic greats.

Rating: ****

The Cheap Detective (1978)

With the somewhat surprise success of Simon’s Murder By Death, the folks at Columbia were suddenly interested in the playwright’s spoofing abilities, so a “sequel” of sorts was green lit: a satire of Humphrey Bogart’s film noir classics, specifically Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. Using the exact same producer, director and (obviously) writer, it was released in the early summer of 1978, and named The Cheap Detective. 

In style, structure and tone it’s nearly identical to Murder By Death. What’s not he same is the number of laughs. While Murder kept its madcap storyline afloat for the duration of 90 minutes, peppering it with twists, turns and hijinks along he way, Detective just isn’t all that engaging. It stars Peter Falk in the title role and a bevy of my favorite character actresses of the 70s in supporting roles, but, aside from a minor chortle here and there, I was mostly stone-faced, and it sure was a long hour-and-a-half.

A plot synopsis seems kind of silly, as it’s basically a pastiche of plots from the movies it satirizes (albeit exaggerated). Falk is Lou Peckinpaugh, a combo of Bogart’s characters Sam Spade and Rick Blaine

(perfect casting; it always seemed like Falk was doing a Bogart impersonation on Columbo anyway). Madeleine Khan shows up at his office, revealing the skeletons in her closet, leading to a murder of which Lou must prove himself innocent. And all the while he gets involved in a hunt by assorted seamy types to find a treasure. Louise Fletcher, as “Ilsa” from Casablanca, needs Lou’s help to get papers for her husband so he can start a restaurant in Oakland (oh yeah – this all takes place in San Francisco). Lou solves the crimes, sees that justice is served, and gets all the dames in the end. 

Yet the question remains: why isn’t this funnier? Clearly, I’m not the only one, given the film’s tepid box office performance. In the DVD’s bonus interview, Simon may have indirectly offered his own explanation – he said the key to the film’s “success” is that it’s not completely based on its source material, and that one can find it funny without having seen Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon. 

But I disagree – I think the humor is entirely based on prerequisite. E.g. – the Ilsa characters goes on and on and on with platitudes about nobly supporting the French cause, an exaggeration of Ingrid Begman’s staunch words of support in Casablanca. And these are films made in the 40s, long before the cinematic purview of most 70s moviegoers. Now, yes, I know Mel Brooks had a massive hit lampooning the Universal monster movies of the 30s in Young Frankenstein, but the humor was broad and farcical enough to be enjoyed solely on its own terms. And it was Brooks himself who started the sea change of comic parody in the mid-seventies, which came to a head with the joke-a-second, sillier-is-better Airplane!, made in 1980 by the Zucker Brothers. By 1978 (the year of Cheap Detective), they had already released the scatological parody Kentucky Fried Movie, and that same year John Landis broke all the rules of movie comedy in general with his raunchy Animal House. Simon’s work was just too darn – pleasant – dare I say quaint? – for young audiences’ of the time. It’s no surprise he went right back to adapting his Broadway works again the following year.

But Detective is certainly well-directed. The comedy timing is fine and the costumes and photography do a good job of replicating the look of those classic films. Maybe ten years earlier…. who knows?

Mariginalia: Louise Fletcher, glammed up now, sure looks a lot better than she did as the icy Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And she actually does a pretty good job delivering those lines with a completely straight face. Too bad she was never better utilized. 

Rating: ***

The Goodbye Girl (1977)

“Goodbye doesn’t mean forever"

The history of Neil Simon’s sole 1977 work, The Goodbye Girl, is a long, involved one. Using the same production team as with his two previous films, Simon penned a screenplay called “Bogart Slept Here,” in which a NY actor and his wife move out to California, neither making a smooth transition to a completely different culture. Marsha Mason was the wife and Robert De Niro the actor, but De Niro had difficulty with Simon’s punny dialogue, and so his role was given to Richard Dreyfuss. Simon decided the two had great chemistry, but that the script needed more jokes – and more romance – so he rewrote the script in six weeks (!), backdating his timeframe, telling the story of their first meeting. Well, the rest, as they say, is history.: The Goodbye Girl was the critical and commercial smash Simon had been waiting for, earning rave reviews, five Oscar nominations (one win for Best Actor), and a whopping 106 million at he box office. Simon’s name would be part of all his movie titles for the next ten years – that’s how you know you’re hot in this biz.

Mason plays Paula McFadden, a former NY dancer who gets dumped by her live-in boyfriend, an actor who packs up one morning and leaves for Italy, with only a goodbye note to mark the occasion. He leaves her nothing, except nowhere to go as he had sublet their apartment before he left, and now the new tenant, Elliot Garfield, shows up, wondering why a strange woman is in his new place. After much confusion and eventual clarification, they agree to split the apartment – with eve more squabbling over how Paula’s young daughter Lucy will fit into the equation.. But Elliot’s a free spirit; it seems as though he will get along far better with precocious Lucy than with her uptight, relationship-jaded mom.

 

Paula tries to nudge some extra income by going back to dancing, but it’s a competitive gig, especially when you’re 33 and out of shape. But Elliot has his own career crisis to deal with: he’s cast as Richard III, but due to a “mentally arthritic” director, he’s

forced to play the role “like a double order of fresh California fruit salad.” The critics don’t take too kindly to Elliot’s gay interpretation, and he finds himself out of work when the show closes as a result. Economic hardship ensues for them both, but misery loves company, and company soon finds its way to romance. When Elliot lands a film role in Hollywood for a month, Paula fears getting burned by a ne’er do well actor once again, but he allays her fears with a true declaration of love, and an invitation for her to come with. She declines, but sees his request as a commitment absent from former loves, and she wishes her new beau well, a “goodbye girl” no longer.

There’s probably no other Neil Simon work, before or since, that simply fills me with sheer joy and elation as I watch it. I just saw it today, for about the fifth or sixth time, and I literally have no idea where that hour-and-fifty-minutes went. In my mind, it’s Simon’s best work hands down; every line is perfectly written, and the story has just the right rhythm of highs and lows to keep it hugely entertaining throughout. Herbert Ross’s direction and Dave Grusin’s score never get in the way of the sublime writing, and the casting is the bet yet, particularly Richard Dreyfuss in a career-defining leading role. He hadn’t really been known for comedy before, but this solidified his skill in that genre. The man was red hot after this too; both this film and the nearly concurrent Close Encounters made him big enough to host SNL a couple months after.

Astounding that the man spent years writing Come Blow Your Horn and only six weeks penning Girl. I think it bears up my theory that writers are at their best under the gun. The fluidity of the puns is probably what impresses me most here; Simon gave us great jokes before, but not always coming from credible mouths. Here, Dreyfuss and Mason – and newcomer Quinn Cummings as Lucy – have a chemistry that only occurs once in a blue moon in a major motion picture. Dreyfuss’s Elliot, sort of the male version of freewheeling Corie Bratter in Barefoot, is naturally funny, so his lines feel perfectly natural. And antagonist Mason is aptly guarded, but guarded for just the right amount of time; too little would be incredible, too much would frustrate the audience.  

Funny how a perfect film stymies a critic (also true of truly bad films; must be an opposites thing). How do you begin to inspect the Mona Lisa? Or the Grand Canyon? Or Hamlet? Yes, I said it – this is Shakespeare for modern comedy writing. And speaking of, how about that Richard III subplot? Absolutely hilarious, and I also admired the scene in which the director (Paul Benedict) calmly discussed his artistic interpretation with Elliot, allowing the hapless actor a compromise. Simon didn’t make this guy a true heavy, rather a realistic avant garde director just looking for artistic originality, just as we all are.

Nothing else to add here. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading, and put it on your Netflix queue. Or stream it, or however people watch movies nowadays. Its not only great, it’s important. 

Stage in Simon’s life: an early real relationship, and his experience with NY actors, and their culture, clearly informed his perspective.

 

Rating: ****

P.S.: Oh, yes- I thought of one thing I didn’t like about this movie: Marsha Mason’s hairstyle. Too much like a boy. Kept me from seeing her as someone Elliot would really be attracted to. Oh, well.