Waste of time

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

I sat down to watch this film because of the three wonderful actresses in the cast - Maureen Stapleton, Barbara Harris and Lee Grant - and I've never been disappointed by Arthur Hiller. I've been slow to warm to Neil Simon, but "The Sunshine Boys" had me in stitches. I mention this to indicate that I had reasonable expectations for this movie.Now I have to be honest and admit that I could only watch one segment, it left such a nasty taste in my mouth. In it, Neil Simon presents us with a marriage that has turned sour and seems to have lost any reason for continuing. Trouble is, the pair just aren't sympathetic or particularly interesting. Never mind the husband (Walter Matthau), Maureen Stapleton as his wife drove ME crazy! Arriving, it seems, right off the set of "Bye Bye Birdie", she prowls the hotel suite, nattering incessantly and hopping from place to place like a sparrow on speed, with that irksome camera constantly pursuing her. I don't wish to sound impatient or cruel. I know she plays a doormat begging for crumbs of respect, and I know that whatever happens (past the final fade-out) she'll get the short end of the stick, and I did feel sorry for her, but her neediness and whining were irritating. As for the husband, he's a heel, plain and simple. The story provides no surprising or interesting revelations. At the end, having sat through the entire segment, I wanted to know the outcome. No such luck. Instead, there's an unmerited and annoying void between the moment when the husband strides out of the suite in the evening to meet with his "secretary" and the wife hops out of the hotel in the morning.When the second segment started - "Just one drink," insists one of the characters (a warning to me that there would be many more) - and the creepy new Matthau persona loomed and it looked as if I was going to be stuck in that same hideous suite, with its puke green and yellow palette, for another forty minutes, I turned the movie off, and breathed a sigh of relief.

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.

Neil Simon possess a gift, he succeeded to dig in the human relationship and go out all the negative the fears, the wrongs and the frustration with the laughter and the funny but all of this whole of blue. It's Blue because his characters are aware to own wrong but at the same time are condemned and all things that they do is useless and worst because this is their nature. The flick narrate 3 tales acclimatized in a Plaza Suite, all the action is concentrated in this room and so all the goodness is addressed on the leading players a wonderful Matthau that play all of 3 characters for the stories. In the first a wife discovered the betrayal of the husband in their 23rd anniversary, in the second a famous Hollywood producer try to seduce one his ex-girlfriend to youngness years, now happiness married, and in the end the problem of a surly couple in the wedding-day of the un-security daughter. Many laughter but each of these with the better retro-taste and melancholy, the three characters compared themselves with own wrong, deny its, scream, fighting but continued in the same wrong. In the end all the things going as must going to damage of the their actions but in every end solutions there is something to good tuck known take you. Wonderful actor trial for Walter Matthau, the cinema world had lost many in his dead, he is a complete actor able to through the mimic facial a express many feelings and players each kind of flick. My rate is 8.

I expected this 1971 film to be a bright comedy. Instead I was presented with the filming of a very deep three-part stage play about the dark side of human relationships; only the last of the three stories could really be called funny.A bride-to-be locks herself in the bathroom and her parents go through all kinds of hilarious slapstick agony trying to persuade her to come out. It is free of the darker undertones of the first two vignettes and has a cute surprise ending with a happy message. The other two, while being wry and witty in places, are really commentaries on the nature of man's unfaithfulness and exploitation of women, and women's culpability in allowing that state of affairs to develop and continue.Walter Matthau plays the lead in each of the three stories, which take place in the same suite, 719, of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. He has different leading ladies in each one: Maureen Stapleton, Barbara Harris and Lee Grant. There are a few incidental characters but the stories revolve around the two main characters in each story. The dialogue is quite true to real life, even appearing to be repetitive and meaningless in places as real life conversations can be, but the playwright is taking us in each case to a specific understanding of the characters. There is nothing extraneous even though at first it appears to be cluttered with incidentals.In the first story, a husband and wife check into the Plaza Hotel for their anniversary - and then things begin to fall apart. Maureen Stapleton as the seemingly scatterbrained wife is brilliant in playing both the tragic and comic aspects of this complicated role. As the story unfolds we realize things are not as they appear on the surface.In the second story, a sleazy Hollywood businessman calls up various names in his little black book so that he can have some woman - any woman - come to his suite for sex from 2 to 4 between meetings. The woman from his past whom he persuades to show up is both afraid of the possible seduction and hoping he will talk her into it. This is all too painful and familiar a scenario and anyone will relate to the awkward dance between two individuals who have to try to save face while getting their needs met.If you are looking for a light and fluffy comedy this is not the one to choose. It will disturb you and make you think about the tragic aspects of love, sex and marriage, long after it is over.