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Lou Peckinpaugh is a San Fransisco gumshoe having an affair with his partner's wife when the partner turns up dead. Investigating the case, Lou has to contend with the widow, three lowlifes seeking some diamond eggs, a French resistance fighter and his wife on the run from the Germans and a dotty old millionaire.
Written by Broadway playwright Neil Simon, this gentle, goofy comedy take on hard-boiled detective stories of the forties artfully combines the plots of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca with a bit of The Big Sleep thrown in for good measure, and the result is an amiably good-natured movie that's hard not to enjoy. Its trump card is the large lovable cast, with Falk doing a great Humphrey Bogart swagger and everyone else chewing the scenery with aplomb as characters with names like Betty DeBoop and Jasper Blubber. Particularly good are the sextet of leading ladies; Ann-Margret is stunningly voluptuous, Brennan is a great torch-song dame, Channing a sweet ingenue, Fletcher a hilarious self-righteous version of Ingrid Bergman, peerless comedienne Kahn a neurotic pathological liar à la Mary Astor, and goldilocks Mason (Simon's wife at the time) the wacky widow who turns out to be the killer. The production quality is first rate, with super costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge and great camera-work by John A. Alonzo (which would have looked even better in black-and-white). I guess this is a kind of lazy, hokey movie, but it does what all good satirical pastiche should do - it's funny in its own right and it's a compliment to the stories and movies it's parodying.
score 6/10
ShootingShark 8 May 2005
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1075791/ |
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23-3-2021 00:05:11