The Cheap Comedy Writer is more like it

rcraig62

I don't think it's imperative that one is a fan of old Bogart movies to watch The Cheap Detective, although it helps.  This is Neil Simon's take on such noir classics as Casablanca, To Have And Have Not and The Maltese Falcon, with maybe a little Chinatown thrown in.  I've never been much of a Neil Simon enthusiast; mostly, my complaint is that his characters lack depth while all he's really looking for is getting off a good line, a sort of Borscht Belt hunger for audience approval that went out of style about a million years ago.  Here, the characters are ready-made, even if they are set up as caricatures for Simon's moderate wit, but even still it falls a little short.


To describe the plot would be almost pointless, since it vaguely resembles the set-up for every private detective movie ever made, good or bad ("of all the cheap joints in the world, she walked into mine" - you get the idea).  From there it progresses, or stagnates, through a series of generally identifiable situations from old Bogart movies.  I'd be lying if I didn't say there were some good laughs, here and there, either quickie one-liners or blatant knock-off scenes that film buffs will immediately pinpoint with the originals.  I liked Dom DeLuise in the Peter Lorre role ("I'm swarthy, smelly, and I reek of cheap perfume") complaining that hotels will only let him stay half the night because of his body odor.  John Houseman is great in the Sydney Greenstreet role, as is Madeline Kahn as the Faye Dunaway-ish sort-of-universal femme fatale with her phone book of alias names.  On the other hand, Louise Fletcher as Bogie's love interest, with her plaintive pleas of "Louis" reminded me more of Hillary Brooke than Lauren Bacall or Ingrid Bergman, and Peter Falk's Bogart is really just so-so, not much better of an imitation than Don Adams'.


There are some ripe possibilties here for satire that Simon doesn't really take.  For instance, if you were a comedy writer spoofing Chinatown, wouldn't you take a shot at the scene where Jack Nicholson gets his nose cut by Roman Polanski then walks around with a big bandage on his nose for half the movie.  Instead, he resorts to the obvious and cliched.  Neil Simon, to me, is not a true wit, in the same league as, say, Woody Allen. He's an OK, slightly above sitcom level gag writer who gets in just enough funny lines to woo the critics, and a whole lot of garbage to appeal to the masses. I'd say "The Cheap Detective" is about par for a Neil Simon script, and that's not saying much.  2 ** out of 4

score 4/10

rcraig62 5 June 2003

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0158249/