The Three Faces of Walter

Though he was fine in many films prior to "The Odd Couple" (1968), that's the movie that made Walter Matthau a star, and it was a big enough hit to convince Paramount Pictures (and later, Columbia) that Neil Simon was the key to box office gold.

Came the 70's, movie screens were alive with Neil Simon play adaptations. Nothing hit as big as "The Odd Couple" (or "Barefoot in the Park" before it), but they provided steady fodder for actors ("The Goodbye Girl" won Richard Dreyfuss an Oscar) and they are now a "time machine" back to the kind of comedy Broadway and Hollywood liked back then.

No actor did as well by Neil Simon as Walter Matthau, and "Plaza Suite" is probably the Neil Simon movie that most served Matthau's particular talents.

If you look at the three different segments of "Plaza Suite," in which Matthau plays three different men opposite three separate female co-stars (dowdy and desperate Maureen Stapleton, dizzily funny Barbara Harris, frenetic and acerbic Lee Grant), you can actually see three different tonalities of Walter Matthau's star acting capability:

1. For the Stapleton story, Matthau wears a moustache (as he did in the drama "Lonely are the Brave" and the thriller "Charade") and a business suit, and comes close to his authoritative dramatic mode: low-voice, thoughtful looks, a certain manly intelligence. This story has comedy, and Matthau will yell in it for comic effect, but he's pretty much at his most low-key and serious here, controlling himself quite well as Stapleton's character gets all the "emotional juice" of an older woman realizing she's maybe losing her age-peer husband to a younger amour.

2. For the Harris story, Matthau(playing a Hollywood phony of a producer) wears a silly, too-youthful wig, a cutesy red-sweater-and-big-collar outfit and elects to use one of his most broad comic effects (one I don't much like, frankly): a kind of mincing lisp (or lispth.)
Matthau usually uses this lisp as a macho male's "joke voice" (as when he jokes around with Jack Lemmon in "The Odd Couple") ,but here it is part of the character. On the other hand, this is a funny little tale of seduction, thus allowing for Matthau to be a little silly...and Barbara Harris takes the crown for the sexiest of Matthau's co-star ladies in the film, while matching him point for point in the comic line-reading department.

3. For the Grant story, Matthau plays much older, with a steel-gray wig of near-military-brush style hair, decked out in a tuxedo and freaking out as the father of a bride who has locked herself in the bathroom of her Plaza Hotel suite on her wedding day. This is Matthau at "top roar blunderbuss" level, and he was always good at such bluster (think: fighting it out with Barbra Streisand in "Hello, Dolly.")

Matthau's range as an actor wasn't huge, but his three different characterizations in "Plaza Suite" reveal how different he COULD be as an actor. They are three skilled performances, and two out of three of them are quite funny. The final story is probably where Matthau pulls out all the comedy stops,but his work is funny enough in the Barbara Harris sequence and quite moving in the Maureen Stapleton opener.

A nice touch: at film's end, Matthau takes successive curtain calls with each of his three female co-stars. Honestly, its like three separate women AND three separate men.