Director Billy Wilder once ecstatically claimed that Walter Matthau "could play anything from Rhett Butler to Scarlett O'Hara." For more than a decade Matthau was as unpredictable as his facial expressions: an adamant sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a psychopathic killer in Charade, an ambulance chaser in The Fortune Cookie, the libidinous suburban husband in A Guide for the Married Man. Of late, his roles have yielded an amusing but unvarying character: the rumpled crank whose shpeesh shoundsh ash if it wash making itsh way around a shigar. Plaza Suite happily puts him in reverse. In Arthur Hiller's rigid transcription of Neil Simon's Broadway one-acters set in Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, Matthau essays not one part but three. Each is unique, all are achingly comic.
In the curtain raiser, fluttery Karen Nash (Maureen Stapleton) books a suite, trying to rekindle the lust hopes of her 23-year-old marriage. But saturnine Sam Nash proves as remote as room service. The reason, Karen correctly deduces, is Sam's office fixture, a Miss McCormack. It is not only the affair that grieves the wronged wife, it is the businessman's lack of enterprise. "Everyone cheats with their secretaries," she wails. "I expected something better from my husband!" But beneath the holy acrimony are wounding truths. Successful Sam is no longer struggling; he wants the arrivé's most inaccessible prize: a destination. His plaint, "I just want to do it all over again," is a caricatured truth on the verge of tragedy. But, as always, Simon pulls back when the laughter stops. His comic mask seems to hide not wisdom but embarrassment.
In the second playlet Matthau is a case of acute satyriasis billed as Jesse Kiplinger, Famous Hollywood Producer. When his New York schedule frees him from 2 to 4 p.m., Jesse books overcoy Muriel (Barbara Harris). He had stolen her maidenhood 17 years earlier in suburbia; now he wants to return to the crime, if not the scene. Acting under an assumed mane, the red-wigged Matthau is a Narcissus whose self-love is contagious. But Muriel is immune until Jesse discovers the secret: big names. Dropping them like rose petals, he strews the path to the bedroom...Frank Sinatra...Paul Newman...Troy Donahue...Lee Marvin...
The movie's zenith is reached in the closer. A florid father, despite misspelled names on matchbooks and overcharging musicians, is trying to give Daughter Mimsey a first-class wedding. Mimsey gives him a first-class crisis instead: she refuses to come out of the bathroom and go to the altar. As the afternoon degenerates, the bridled father's assaults on the bathroom door leave him and his cutaway looking like Salvation Army rejects. His face a frieze of capillaries, Matthau ultimately makes King Lear seem a whining serf.
All three skits are only mildly illuminating front-line communiqués from the sexual wars. But when Simon is writing them and Matthau reading them, substance seems almost beside the point. This has been a drab year for domestic comedy; in the valley of the bland, the one-joke man is king.