How does one explain the success, critical and public, of an insignificant concoction such as Alan Alda’s The Four Seasons? One cause might be the chance to see such beloved TV performers as Carol Burnett, Alan Alda, and some of the rest on the big screen, where, among other things, they can address themselves to such serious matters as the effects of one couple’s loud copulations on two other friendly couples separated only by the thin partitions of a rented yacht. The other cause, though, must be that the three closely coexisting married couples of the film (written and directed by Alda) represent ordinary people dealing with such ordinary vicissitudes as divorce, maladjusted children, problematic remarriage, and splitting a restaurant bill among friends who did not each eat and drink the same amount.
Mostly, The Four Seasons is about varieties of friendship, fondness, and love as they affect plain middle-class people who take their vacations together. Already the idea of four vacations—one each season, and each introduced by the appropriate section of Vivaldi’s “The Seasons” (not “The Four Seasons,” by the way!)—smacks of gimmickry. How many trios of average couples can afford—financially and emotionally—four fairly lavish annual vacations in one another’s company, year after companionable year? Such things exist only in a sit-com writer’s schematizing imagination. But let’s concede the point and consider what Alda’s views of, and insights into, such (ugh!) togetherness are. Jack Weston is a Jewish dentist married to Rita Moreno, an Italo-American. His chief characteristics are materialism, pettiness about money, and all kinds of neurotic fears, mostly about dying. Her specialties are lust for life, kidding her husband, and ostentatious pride in her Italianness. Stereotypes? You bet your tuches and culo!
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