Gumshoe (1971)

          A peculiar byproduct of the ’70s film-noir revival, this British picture stars Albert Finney as a Liverpool everyman who works at a nightclub but aspires to be a private eye in the Chandler/Hammett mode. As a result, he regularly slips into a stilted American accent, talking about “dames” and “heaters” and such even though everyone around him speaks in normal early-‘70s British vernacular. Gumshoe is sort of a spoof, but because the storyline gets convoluted and dark, it’s also sort of a thriller and sort of a whodunnit. Oh, and sort of a character study, too. However, it’s worth noting that Gumshoe was the directorial debut of Stephen Frears, who has made a career out of mixing genres in such offbeat movies as The Grifters (1990) and Dirty Pretty Things (2002)—so it’s possible Gumshoe was deliberately conceived as self-reflexive satire. Whatever the intentions, the result is the same—Gumshoe is sluggish and unfocused, with a number of interesting scenes contributing to an underwhelming sum effect.

          Finney plays Eddie Ginley, a bitter man whose true love, Ellen (Billie Whitelaw), left him for his own brother, William (Frank Finlay). Worse, William is a successful businessman with influence at Eddie’s nightclub, so even though the siblings hate each other, Eddie depends on William’s goodwill for continued employment. When the movie begins, Eddie half-jokingly places a newspaper ad offering his services as a private eye. Soon afterward, a client shows up and gives Eddie a package containing a gun, money, and a photo of a woman—instructions for a paid murder? At first, Eddie thinks his brother is playing a cruel joke, but then he realizes he’s been drawn into a strange mystery involving debauchery, deceit, and drugs. Unfortunately, the mystery is nearly impenetrable, and Eddie’s not a sufficiently interesting character to justify the effort of slogging through the plot. (The actors’ thick blue-collar accents make comprehension even more difficult.) Finney’s performance is low-key to a fault, despite flashes of cynical charm, so Finlay’s seething malice and Whitelaw’s pained ambivalence command greater attention—a considerable problem since they’re only in the movie periodically, whereas Finney is in nearly every scene.

Gumshoe: FUNKY

Night Moves (1975)

          Complementing outright throwbacks such as Chinatown (1974), several ’70s thrillers updated classic film-noir style with modern characters, settings, and themes. Arthur Penn’s Night Moves is among the best of these current-day noirs, featuring a small-time detective who has seen too much misery to muster any real hope for the human species. Nonetheless, like all the best noir heroes, he strives to do something good as a way of compensating for all the bad in the world, and thus ironically dooms not only himself but also the very people he’s trying to protect. Penn, whose erratic feature career peaked with a run of counterculture-themed pictures spanning from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to this film, was at his best orchestrating subtle interactions between complicated characters, and he does a terrific job in Night Moves of meshing bitter tonalities.

          A seething Gene Hackman stars as low-rent L.A. investigator Harry Moseby. An amiable idealist whose principles alienate him from the compromisers who surround him, Harry is married to Ellen (Susan Clark), who wants him to shutter his one-man agency and work for a big firm. Preferring to steer his own course, Harry focuses on his next case, which involves tracking down teen runaway Delly (Melanie Griffith), the daughter of a blowsy widow (Janet Ward) who, a lifetime ago, was a promiscuous Hollywood starlet. During downtime between investigative chores, Harry discovers that Ellen is cheating on him, so he’s only too happy to follow a lead on Delly’s whereabouts to Florida, a continent away from his troubled marriage. In the sweaty Florida Keys, Harry finds Delly living with her lecherous stepfather, Tom (John Crawford), and his sexy companion, Paula (Jennifer Warren). Also part of the mix is Quentin (James Woods), a squirrelly friend of Delly’s who works as a mechanic for film-industry stuntmen.

          Alan Sharp’s provocative script features murky plotting but crisp character work, so even when the story is hard to follow, moment-to-moment engagement between people is interesting. And since the film is driven by Harry’s zigzag journey from naïveté to despair and then to a misguided sort of optimism, each time he encounters some tricky new piece of information, his relationship with someone changes. Though Hackman was never one to play for cheap sympathy, it’s heartbreaking to watch Harry cast about for someone who deserves his trust, only to be disappointed again and again.

          Every performance in the movie exists in the shadow of Hackman’s great work, but all of the actors hit the right notes, with Griffith’s adolescent petulance resonating strongly. Composer Michael Small and cinematographer Bruce Surtees contribute tremendously to the film’s shadowy mood, and Penn achieves one of his finest cinematic moments with the picture’s desolate finale. Night Moves gets a bit pretentious at times, but when the movie is really flying, it becomes a potent meditation on the challenge of finding sold moral footing during a confusing period in the evolution of the American identity.

Night Moves: GROOVY

Hustle (1975)

          An admirable but not entirely successful attempt at transplanting classic film-noir themes into a hip ’70s milieu, this downbeat detective thriller features the peculiar pairing of delicate Gallic beauty Catherine Deneuve and suave Deep South stud Burt Reynolds. The fact that these actors don’t exist in the same cinematic universe reflects the many clashing tonalities director Robert Aldrich brings to Hustle. After smoothly blending comedy and drama in an earlier Reynolds movie, The Longest Yard (1974), Aldrich tries to do too many things here, because Hustle aspires to be a tragedy, a whodunit, a commentary on sexual politics, and more. Since Aldrich was generally at his best making unpretentious pulp, with deeper themes buried below the surface, his striving for Big Statements is awkward—much in the same way that Deneuve’s cool sophistication fails to gel with Reynolds’ hot emotionalism, the high and low aspects of this movie’s storytelling collide to produce a narrative muddle.

          The picture begins with cynical LA detectives Phil Gaines (Reynolds) and Louis Belgrave (Paul Winfield) commencing their investigation into the murder of a young hooker. The victim’s father, Korean War vet Marty Hollinger (Ben Johnson), is sniffing around the crime as well, because he wants revenge. When clues identify lawyer Leo Sellers (Eddie Albert) as a possible suspect, things get tricky not only because Sellers has political influence but because Sellers is a patron of another hooker, Nicole (Deneuve)—who happens to be Phil’s girlfriend.

          The idea of a cop living on both sides of the law is always provocative, but in this case, Phil’s relationship with Nicole makes him unsympathetic. Tolerating her demeaning career paints him as a user, while pushing her to abandon her work suggests he’s a chauvinist; there’s no way for Reynolds to win. Nonetheless, the actor gives a valiant effort, while Deneuve struggles to elevate her clichéd role despite obvious difficulty with English-language dialogue. Inhibited by iffy writing and overreaching direction, the stars end up letting their physicality do most of the acting—Deneuve looks ravishing and Reynolds looks tough. But that’s not enough. Excepting Johnson, whose obsessive bloodlust resonates, most of the skilled supporting cast gets lost in the cinematic muddiness, and Aldrich does no one any favors by shooting interiors with ugly, high-contrast lighting. Still, Hustle gets points for seediness and for the nihilism of its ending.

Hustle: FUNKY

Peeper (1976)

          Yet another film-noir spoof, as if there weren’t enough of those in the ’70s, Peeper is a trifle that goes down smoothly because of charismatic actors and skilled filmmakers, even though it’s among the least memorable pictures ever made by its participants. Director Peter Hyams, who tried his hand at several genres before eventually finding his groove with larky conspiracy thrillers in the late ’70s, wasn’t the right man to helm a lighthearted parody, so his assertive visual style clashes with the material from beginning to end. That said, screenwriter W.D. Richter (working from a novel by Keith Laumer) was in the early days of an equally eclectic career, so his script misses the mark just as widely as Hyams’ direction. Richter capably emulates some tropes of ’40s private-eye movies, notably caustic narration, but his screenplay isn’t clever or funny enough to make an impression. Nonetheless, Hyams’ sophisticated approach to image-making and Richter’s cockeyed dialogue style are interesting in any context, so their behind-the-scenes efforts ensure that Peeper has style, albeit not the correct style.

          Better still, Peeper has Michael Caine. Even though the charming Cockney rogue coasts through this picture, it’s pleasurable to listen to him deliver snotty rants like this one: “My having the photo bothers you, you being bothered bothers me, and the fact that I haven’t been thrown out of here sooner bothers me even more.” And, yes, the plot of Peeper is so murky that Caine’s speech actually makes sense in context. The gist of the story, which takes place in the ’40s, is that second-rate private eye Tucker (Caine) has been hired to find a man’s long-missing daughter, who is now an adult. Tucker discerns that the woman might have become part of the Pendergast family, a wealthy clan living in Beverly Hills, and Tucker sets his eyes on Ellen (Natalie Wood) as a likely prospect. Intrigue and shenanigans ensue, none of them particularly distinctive or intriguing, though the stars do exactly what’s expected of them. Caine is bitchy and suave, while Wood is aloof and gorgeous. So, if you want a minor jolt of star power delivered in attractive packaging, Peeper might entertain you—just remember to adjust your expectations.

Peeper: FUNKY

The Cheap Detective (1978)

          Yet another of the myriad film-noir spoofs that proliferated during the ’70s, The Cheap Detective is surprisingly underwhelming given its all-star cast and brand-name writer. Neil Simon, opting for broad farce instead of his usual domestic dramedy, weaves together storylines and stylistic tropes from assorted ’40s detective movies, mostly those starring Humphrey Bogart. Peter Falk stars as Lou Peckinpaugh, a San Francisco private eye who gets embroiled in a plot that’s a little bit Casablanca, a little bit Maltese Falcon, and a little bit of everything else. His partner gets killed, villains search for a cache of super-sized diamonds, and Lou juggles romantic intrigue with several dizzy dames. The movie’s gags are so silly that characters have names like Betty DeBoop, Jasper Blubber, and Jezebel Dezire.

          Based on this movie and Neil Simon’s other noir spoof from the same era starring Peter Falk, 1976’s Murder by Death, one gets the impression that Simon was trying to outdo Mel Brooks at the anything-goes approach to lampooning movie genres, but Simon simply couldn’t match the inspired lunacy that made Brooks’ spoofs so delirious. By trying to keep dialogue crisp and plotting rational, Simon’s attempt at this style falls somewhere between the extremes of proper storytelling and wild abandon. Thus, The Cheap Detective is fluffy without being truly irreverent and goofy without being truly insane—it’s like a second-rate Carol Burnett Show sketch, needlessly extended to feature length. What’s more, the movie is hurt by flat direction, as TV-trained helmer Robert Moore lacks the ability to generate exciting visuals.

          Yet another problem is the all-over-the-map acting. The most enjoyable performances, by Falk and supporting players Eileen Brennan, Stockard Channing, Madeline Kahn, and Fernando Lamas, wink at the audience without tipping into Borscht Belt excess. The most tiresome turns, by players including Ann-Margret, James Coco, Dom DeLuise, and Marsha Mason, fall into exactly that trap. (Though it must be said that Sid Caesar kills during one of the movie’s dumbest scenes, thanks to his legendary comic timing.) Some actors, however, seem completely adrift: Louise Fletcher, John Houseman, and Nicol Williamson strive to find consistent tonalities for their work, apparently receiving little guidance from Moore or the slapdash script. With this much talent involved, The Cheap Detective has a few bright spots, but the total package is quite blah.

The Cheap Detective: FUNKY

The Black Bird (1975)

The film-noir revival of the mid-’70s produced a lot of interesting films, including a handful of comedies satirizing the tropes of classic private-dick flicks. In The Black Bird, George Segal plays Sam Spade Jr., son of the detective character played by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941)—the idea is that Sam Sr. left the actual Maltese Falcon among his personal effects, and three decades after the first set of lowlifes tried to acquire “the black bird,” a new crop of loonies pursues the prize. Story author Gordon Cotler came up with a decent concept, but screenwriter-director David Giler employs cheap gags instead of sophisticated wit. For example, characters keep joking that how strange it is that Segal’s character is named “spade” even though he’s not black. The movie isn’t quite as bad as that running joke suggests, but it’s not great. To the filmmakers’ credit, the narrative is as convoluted as anything Maltese Falcon author Dashiell Hammett ever wrote, so the spirit of the thing is basically right, with deceitful dames and trigger-happy thugs appearing at every turn; furthermore, the Sam Spade Jr. character combines the usual cynicism of a noir detective with the added element of familial resentment, since he hates the fact that he inherited his dad’s business. Segal is also in rare form here, demonstrating impeccable comic timing with his exasperated line readings, slow-burn reactions, and tumbling pratfalls. He tries valiantly to raise the level of the material, so whenever the movie settles into long dialogue passages, things start to crackle. (The best verbal interplay is between Segal and gravel-voiced character actor Lionel Stander, playing a slow-witted hoodlum who ingratiates himself into Spade’s life.) However, many key elements in the movie just sit there, like the absurd villain (an excitable Nazi dwarf, if you can believe that) and the forgettable leading lady (thick-accented French actress Stéphane Audran). So, even though The Black Bird is amusing-ish, it never coalesces into anything special.

The Black Bird: FUNKY

Cry Uncle (1971)

Truly vile, this low-budget attempt at spoofing the private-eye genre features excitable character actor Allen Garfield in one of his few leading roles, but the picture’s real claim to notoriety is that it’s an early effort by director John G. Avildsen, who later rose to fame with the Rocky and Karate Kid franchises. Whereas those series comprise feel-good family entertainment, Cry Uncle is a gutter-level sex flick; in fact, thanks to copious amounts of nudity, a few unpleasantly realistic sex scenes, and a generally depraved atmosphere, Cry Uncle carried an X-rating in its original release. The story is the usual film-noir gobbledygook about a private detective getting embroiled in a morally complex blackmail case, and (of course) the detective becomes sexually involved with someone related to the case. On the plus side are a few amusing throwaway moments, like the scene with a chain-smoking cop (Paul Sorvino in an early role) who can’t stop coughing. Additionally, some viewers might find Garfield’s performance amusing, since he takes his exacerbated-everyman persona to a greater extreme here than in most other films. However, it’s difficult to see beyond the movie’s grimy sexual content, since lowbrow smut infuses nearly every frame (in the few scenes when characters aren’t actually screwing, they’re talking about screwing). Given that most of the carnal scenes involve Garfield, whose physique is not exactly that of an Adonis, it’s evident that Avildsen was after something other than titillation—there’s nothing remotely sexy about watching hairy, overweight, sweaty Garfield mount one woman after another. Presumably, Avildsen was trying to mock the film-noir trope of private dicks being sexual catnip for all the women they meet. Whatever the intent, humor is nowhere to be found in scenes like the jaw-dropping moment when Garfield’s sex-crazed character rapes a corpse. The irony is that if Cry Uncle didn’t have so much sleaze, it might have been a watchable spoof. As is, however, the plot-driven scenes are probably boring for viewers who prefer the raunchy bits, and the sex scenes are so unpleasant they sour the experience of following the story.

Cry Uncle: SQUARE

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

          Highly regarded as one of the most faithful adaptations of a Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely is an oddity among the films that comprised the noir boom of the mid-’70s. Unlike, say, Chinatown (1974), which placed a contemporary cast in a period milieu to achieve a postmodern effect, Farewell, My Lovely stars an actor who appeared in several classics of the original late ’40s noir cycle: Robert Mitchum. And while Mitchum’s advanced age creates some storytelling hiccups, like the idea that his character is sexual catnip for a young beauty, his deep association with the genre and the hangdog quality that made him a good fit for vintage noir are used to great effect; Mitchum lumbers around Farewell, My Lovely like he’s the same poor bastard he played in Out of the Past (1947) after another 30 years of rough road.

          In addition to its well-cast leading man, the picture boasts a smooth script by David Zelag Goodman. The screenplay retains Chandler’s pithiest observations (via Mitchum’s world-weary voiceover) and lets the story spiral off into all the right murky tangents without losing narrative coherence. Describing a Chandler plot in the abstract does nothing to capture the story’s appeal, but the broad strokes are that a muscle-bound crook named Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran) hires private dick Philip Marlowe (Mitchum) to track down his long-lost girlfriend. This draws Marlowe into a web of hoodlums, politicians, and whores, so before long Marlowe’s been beaten, shot at, shot up, and generally put through the wringer. Along the way, he commences a torrid romance with a powerful judge’s fag-hag trophy wife, Helen Grayle (Charlotte Rampling). The movie gets seedier as it progresses, with Marlowe serving as the audience’s tour guide through the underworld.

          Director Dick Richards gets preoccupied with aping the visual style of classic noir flicks (lotsa neon and venetian blinds), so the more amateurish actors in the cast don’t get the attention they need, and Richards is pretty inept handling the sequence of Marlowe getting hopped up on dope. Nonetheless, the story is compelling—in Chandler’s universe, bad situations always get worse—and the supporting cast is colorful. John Ireland stands out as Marlowe’s policeman pal, the stalwart Detective Nulty, and Sylvia Miles received an Oscar nomination for her grotesque turn as a boozy ex-showgirl. Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, and Anthony Zerbe show up at regular intervals, and there’s even a brief appearance by a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone. Farewell, My Lovely is uneven, but its virtues are plentiful.

Farewell, My Lovely: GROOVY

The Late Show (1977)

          After making his name by co-writing Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and other pictures, Robert Benton graduated to directing with the admirable Western Bad Company (1972), then tackled another beloved Hollywood genre with his sophomore effort. An homage to classic detective pictures, The Late Show proceeds from a decent premise: What happens when an old-school gumshoe right out of a ’40s private-eye flick gets thrown together with a hippie chick so peace-and-love ’70s that they barely speak the same language? Right from the beginning of the film, however, the premise is undercut by Benton’s undisciplined script, which wobbles between comedy, drama, and suspense; furthermore, logic takes a beating as characters make profoundly stupid decisions, survive impossible predicaments, and walk away from crime scenes as if nothing happened. And while it’s a given that engrossing mystery films can sometimes surmount nonsensical narratives (see 1946’s classic but incomprehensible The Big Sleep), The Late Show isn’t anywhere near entertaining enough to merit sorting through its unnecessarily convoluted plot.
          In addition to logic problems and tonal inconsistency, the movie is so slow-moving that it’s nearly interminable for viewers who don’t fall in love with the leading characters. On the plus side, Honeymooners icon Art Carney delivers a terrific leading performance as a crusty old private dick—his character is a tip of the fedora to the tough-but-decent investigators once played by Humphrey Bogart and the like. However, Carney’s costar, Lily Tomlin, comes across as an airheaded flibbertigibbet so preoccupied with “vibes” that it’s as if she’s transmitting from another dimension; she barely stops talking during her scenes, and nothing she says is remotely interesting. This makes the many Carney-Tomlin scenes forced and tiresome, whereas Carney’s fleeting bits with comedy pro Bill Macy have a spark the rest of the picture lacks. As a result of its many flaws, The Late Show is a well-intentioned but dreary oddity that doesn’t come close to hitting the stylistic sweet spot.
          It should be noted, however, that the preceding represents a minority opinion; Benton received an Oscar nomination for his script, and Tomlin got a Golden Globe nod for her performance. The Late Show seems to have far more admirers than detractors, so if any of the above intrigues you, by all means, dig in and, as the saying goes, your experience may differ. For my part, I enjoy nearly everyone involved in The Late Show and was therefore surprised to find their combined efforts so thoroughly uninteresting—the disparate elements of the picture just didn’t cohere for me.

The Late Show: LAME

Pulp (1972)

          After scoring critically and commercially with the vicious crime thriller Get Carter (1971), star Michael Caine and writer-director Mike Hodges reteamed for a more playful look at the crime genre with Pulp, a darkly comedic romp that pokes fun at hard-boiled detective fiction and old gangster movies. Unfortunately, tonal problems prevent the duo from achieving their goals as effectively as they did in their previous collaboration: Whereas Get Carter starts slowly and builds steam but always relentlessly pursues the goal of generating violent intensity, Pulp never finds its footing in terms of mood or pacing. Yet even though Pulp drags during many flatly informative sequences and suffers from a remoteness that makes it difficult to get emotionally involved with the characters, the picture boasts swaggering style and mordant wit.

          Caine stars as Mickey King, a English author of déclassé detective fiction living in Italy. He’s hired by a mysterious benefactor to travel to Malta, where he’s expected to ghostwrite his employer’s autobiography. Intrigue and murders that happen along the way to Malta show King that he’s in over his head, and his suspicions are confirmed when he meets his bizarre boss: faded movie star Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney), a onetime leading man in gangster flicks. Turns out Preston plans to use his memoir to reveal a scandalous secret involving several powerful muckety-mucks, which makes him a target and puts his ghostwriter, King, squarely in the crossfire.

          Especially when viewers discover Gilbert’s unpleasant secret, it’s difficult to find much humor in Pulp’s storyline, which is nearly as nihilistic as that of Get Carter. So the fact that Hodges and Caine play the piece like a comedy, right down to Caine’s trenchantly funny noir-style voiceover, creates a jarring dissonance. In fact, watching Pulp is rather like listening to a sadist roar with laughter while describing an atrocity: The storytellers clearly find this stuff terribly droll, but their laughter isn’t contagious.

          Still, the Malta locations have a vivid, sun-baked authenticity, Caine is his usual watchable self, and some of the dialogue exchanges and voiceover remarks are memorably tart. (“It was a ghost town,” Caine narrates at one point. “Two crossed coffins in the Michelin guide.”) Rooney, however, is insufferable, so amped-up and overbearing that he’s exhausting to watch, and among the supporting players, only gravel-voiced Lionel Stander is quasi-memorable as Preston’s hair-triggered manservant. As a result, Caine’s star power is the most consistently pleasurable element of this strange movie.

Pulp: FUNKY

Chinatown (1974)

          Screenwriter Robert Towne has famously described his masterpiece Chinatown as a story about “the failure of good intentions,” and that cryptic quip says a lot about the film’s enduring power. Superficially a straightforward film noir about an adultery investigation that unravels a far-reaching conspiracy and also ghastly personal secrets, the picture is fundamentally a profound statement about the impossibility of finding definitive moral high ground. And though this provocative thematic material is unquestionably Towne’s creation, the product of a native Los Angeleno’s preoccupation with his hometown’s sordid past, director Roman Polanski delivers the narrative in his uniquely cynical voice, embellishing the tale with uncredited screenwriting contributions, ingenious camerawork, and even a tart supporting performance. It’s a perfect blending of two cinematic alchemists. The central character is L.A. private eye J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), an ex-cop who now earns an undignified living peering through peepholes so he can catch wayward husbands and wives in flagrante delicto.
          Through convoluted circumstances that only become clear as the masterfully organized film unspools, Gittes comes into the employ of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), the beautiful but chilly wife of a high-ranking official in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Partially through investigative skill, partially by dumb luck, and partially via sheer persistence, Gittes uncovers a scheme by Mulwray’s powerful father, Noah Cross (John Huston), to make money off the city’s insatiable thirst for water, and Gittes also uncovers shocking truths about the private lives of the Mulwray clan.
          The film’s haunting title refers to the idea that white cops keep a safe distance from internal conflicts in L.A.’s Chinatown district because they’re so ignorant of Chinese culture that they often stir up more trouble than they repair, simply by intruding where they don’t belong. This sad theme of irreparably twisted circumstances runs through every scene of Polanski’s deeply melancholy film. Whereas many lesser ’70s homages to classic film noir simply ape the saxophones-and-venetian-blinds surface of that venerable genre, Chinatown matches the surface plus the fatalistic foundation of noir; Chinatown then goes further still by using the trappings of noir to make an elegantly hopeless comment about the disconnectedness running through American society in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
          Towne won an Oscar for his work, and others on the team earned nominations for their equally excellent contributions: Dunaway and Nicholson got nods for their tragic portrayals, John A. Alonzo’s moody cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith’s elegiac score were recognized, and Polanski got a nom for his direction. Glaringly absent was recognition for Huston’s brief but unforgettable performance as heartless titan Cross. The way he intentionally mutilates the pronunciation of Gittes’ name, in that inimitably moist Huston growl, is one of the most vivid character details in any ’70s movie. Meditative and subtle, Chinatown is like the mystery it depicts: an enigma that becomes more fascinating and frightening each time it’s reexamined.

Chinatown: OUTTA SIGHT

Chandler (1971)

So miscast that his unique screen persona is suffocated, roughly made and distinctly Southern everyman Warren Oates stars as a modern-day private dick in Chandler, a lesser entry in the seemingly endless series of ’70s thrillers paying homage to classic film noir. Directed and co-written by Paul Magwood, who for obvious reasons never made another movie, Chandler features many of the usual private-investigator tropes, but sluggish pacing and an incoherent storyline make it almost unwatchable. On the plus side, the movie looks good and features several colorful actors (Leslie Caron, Scatman Crothers, Gloria Grahame, Mitchell Ryan). Additionally, the leisurely camerawork provides lingering looks at such Los Angeles landmarks as Olvera Street and Union Station circa the early ’70s, but you know a movie is in trouble when the scenery is more interesting than the story. The inconsequential plot is the usual gobbledygook about a tough gumshoe falling for the dame he’s supposed to observe, and many of the film’s scenes are so casual—like Oates’ chatty introduction to Caron on a train bound for Monterey—that it feels like the filmmakers shot the actors hanging out on set instead of performing dramatic scenes. Even with this loose storytelling approach, Chandler manages to make the experience of watching Oates boring, which is quite an accomplishment given his eccentric dynamism, and suffice to say nothing sparks between him and Caron, who seems like she’s from a different universe. Apparently gallons of bad blood were spilled after filming ended: The movie was re-edited without the director’s participation, so huge chunks of story were excised; the first composer was fired and a new score was installed; and Caron sued to get her name over the title. It’s possible a good movie was buried inside the raw material, but the version that survives is confusing and dull, of interest only to noir nuts and Oates obsessives.

Chandler: LAME