Neil Simon is generally thought of with all those New York City plays that he did, and as I mentioned before he had rather less success with California Suite. It's not the only time one of his works went to the west coast, however, as you can see in Max Dugan Returns, which will be on FXM tomorrow at 11:35 AM.
A very young Matthew Broderick plays Michael McPhee, a high school student in southern California who gets up one morning and wakes up his mom Nora (Marsha Mason). She was up most of the night grading exams as an English teacher at the same high school Michael attends. She's grossly underpaid, considering the crappy bungalow she and Michael live in, and how she can't afford anything better than a car that's almost 20 years old and barely starts. And even that gets stolen because she leaves the key in the ignition. This leads her to meet Brian Costello (Donald Sutherland), a police detective who gets the call to investigate the stolen car.
Brian takes an immediate liking to Nora, even lending her a motor scooter he picked up cheap at a police auction (although, in a running joke, that will get stolen too). Brian even asks Nora out to dinner, which is pretty quick considering he's only known her for a few hours and is supposed to have a professional relationship with her.
Later that evening, Nora gets a phone call from a mysterious voice who seems to know a lot about Nora. That voice belongs to Max Dugan (Jason Robards), who was Nora's father at least until he abandoned the family when he was very young. He wants to see Nora and the grandson he never knew he had, in part to make amends for all the wrong he's done, and in part because he's probably terminally ill with a bad heart. In the intervening years, Max had done a stretch in prison for embezzlement, got out and invested in real estate in the Las Vegas area only for one of the casinos to use government chicanery to get the land without having to pay Max anything, which seems grossly unconstitutional.
That led Max to get a job at said casino, so that he could skim money from them equal to the amount that Max feels he was bilked by the casino. And he shows up at the house with a satchel full of that money in cold, hard cash. Nora is understandably uncomfortable, and can't bring herself to bring the truth about this man to Michael. She certainly can't be truthful about Max to Brian, since that will mean certain arrest which would kill Max. Can't he just spend his last few months on earth peacefully?
Well, Max doesn't necessarily want to spend the time quite that peacefully. Instead, he's decided that he's going to make amends by buying Nora and Michael all the things that they haven't been able to have up to this point. This, unsurprisingly, causes big problems since Brian will see everything and know that something isn't right, and fairly easily put two and two together.
Max Dugan Returns certainly has plot holes that will require you to suspend belief, such as how Max would be able to embezzle from the casino considering all the cameras they've got to try to catch cheats. And Marsha Mason's character having to lie constantly gets old pretty fast. But for the most part the movie succeeds, and is definitely a whole lot better than California Suite. Robards is fun in the deadpan role, doing the sort of thing George Burns did in The Sunshine Boys several years earlier. And Donald Sutherland shows he's surprisingly good at reacting to everybody else around him being nuts, although then again he'd already been in M*A*S*H and Kelly's Heroes so he'd had some experience with comedy.
In the end, Max Dugan Returns is a charming, if unrealistic picture, and one that's definitely worth a watch.
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