Pauline Kael

“These Wasp plays represent the serious side of Neil Simon, which turns out to be surprisingly close to Noël Coward—not good Coward but mawkishly bittersweet Coward, in which gallant people use bitchy wisecracks to conceal their breaking hearts…. The entire point of the bickering between Jane Fonda, the intellectual snob, and Alan Alda, as her screenwriter ex-husband, who accuses her of never having had "an honest emotion," is how vulnerable she is…. [E]ach playlet reaches its climax when the mask of sophistication is dropped and we see the suffering face. The plays are stripteases: brittle, glittering "successful" people are brought down to ordinary humanity.

“California Suite is such an acute embarrassment because Herbert Ross directs as if he thought there were depth in the lines, when what he has got Jane Fonda, Maggie Smith, and Michael Caine bringing out is the sentimentality in them. When Laurence Olivier does his virtuoso turns in pictures such as The Betsy and The Boys from Brazil, we can see that he isn't deceived about the quality of the material but that he's enjoying himself acting anyway. Jane Fonda and Maggie Smith are anxious and straining, as if they thought there were something more in the material, which was eluding them. They do extraordinarily well by it, but they're not fun to watch, as Olivier is. You may find yourself flinching at the toads that leap out of their mouths. [Compare to Come Back to 5 & Dime and Crimes of the Heart.]

“Jane Fonda plays Hannah, one of those career-centered, woman-of-distinction roles left over from the forties: a veneered cold bitch, a boss lady…. [Alda] gives such a flabby, insecure performance that Bill doesn't seem to be a full person, and Hannah's attacks on him appear gratuitously spiteful … It isn't just that Hannah is more than Bill's match--Fonda is more than Alda's match. She's whirring around and hitting emotional peaks in a vacuum; it might be better if she just ran the gamut of emotions from A to B rather than race from A to Z. Jane Fonda is so tensely eager to act that she puts out too much. Her comic edginess, her emotional precision, the heat rising in her cheeks, even that slender, wiry body primed for movement are too electric for her to be taking cheap shots at L.A. (while her heart is breaking). The only time I heard myself laugh was at a line that probably isn't meant to be funny: when she says of her current lover (who hasn't long to live) that "he has the second-best mind I've ever met since Adlai Stevenson."…. [left out good line by Kael, "I may go out of my intelligent mind", because of exposition to get there.]”

“Maggie Smith and Michael Caine have a more evenly balanced sparring match. Maggie Smith plays as if her situations and lines were witty, and she makes them so by the distancing device of eccentricity. She goes beyond cleverness: it’s a succinct performance—each gesture is an epigram. Yet there’s a cost: when an actor triumphs in great material you can often feel the joy she takes in the material that is bearing her aloft; here, with Maggie Smith triumphing over her material, you can see the tiny frown lines, the doubt….”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, January 8, 1979
When the Lights Go Down, 529-30