Summer of ’78: “The Cheap Detective”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Cheap Detective

Release Date: June 23, 1978

Cast: Peter Falk, Madeline Kahn, Ann-Margret, Eileen Brennan, Dom DeLuise

The Buzz: If you loved Murder by Death, perhaps you’ll tolerate The Cheap Detective.

Keywords: Sequel, Second Part, Detective

The Plot: Apparently The Cheap Detective doesn’t have much of a following, seeing as it only has three IMDb keywords and two of them are wrong. This is not actually a sequel to Murder by Death, in which Peter Falk played the Sam Spade-ish detective Sam Diamond. Here Falk plays the Sam Spade-ish detective Lou Peckinpaugh. See – totally different thing. It is true that both films were written by Neil Simon in his wacky mode (as opposed to his more popular treacly mode), and Detective is clearly intended to capitalize on the success of the earlier movie. A mash-up spoof of both The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, it’s set in San Francisco on the eve of World War II. Peckinpaugh is a private eye whose partner has been murdered, along with a bunch of innocent bystanders. Since Peckinpaugh had been carrying on an affair with his partner’s wife Georgia (Marsha Mason), he’s immediately a suspect. Georgia is only the first in a string of unlikely femmes fatale who get Peckinpaugh in and out of trouble through the course of the movie. There’s also Eileen Brennan as sultry saloon singer Betty DeBoop, Louise Fletcher as the stand-in for Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa from Casablanca, and Madeline Kahn as the ludicrously evasive Mrs. Montenegro. Somewhere in the convoluted tangle of events, Peckinpaugh also gets involved with John Houseman and Dom DeLuise as a Sydney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre pair looking for a dozen valuable diamond eggs.

The Test of Time: Compared to the typical zany comedy of today, The Cheap Detective is far less crude – but that’s not the same as saying it’s more sophisticated. What passed for a shocking sight gag in 1978 – like Kahn accidentally flushing her husband’s ashes down the toilet – wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the age of the execrable The Love Guru, in which grown men do battle with urine-soaked mops. Simon is taking his own shot at his Your Show of Shows colleague Mel Brooks’s brand of lowbrow parody, but seems unwilling to really get down and dirty. He and director Robert Moore assembled a month’s worth of Hollywood Squares stars for the supporting cast, including Abe Vigoda, Vic Tayback, Paul Williams, Scatman Crothers, David Ogden Stiers and James Coco, but to no avail. The Cheap Detective settles for cheap laughs, from a Chinese character named “Won Fat Ching” to groaners like “Oh, Georgia, I had you on my mind.” Falk does his best Bogart impression, which sounds a lot like Columbo.

Quotable Quote: “I wasn't talking to you, Schnell, I was telling him to go faster.”

2008 Equivalent: A spoofy spy story that really did originate with Mel Brooks, Get Smart.

Previously on Summer of '78: Jaws 2

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE MALTESE FALCON

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:15:00 GMT

The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are often considered the two greatest acheivements of detective noir prior to the post-war era. It's by no means incidental to their reputation that both starred the pitch-perfect Humphrey Bogart, nor that in both films, he portrayed a classic private eye created by one of the standout pulp witers of the previous decade. Though both have been rescued from dime-novel oblivion by later critics who were able to pick out their substantial literary talents from the low-level hackwork that comprised much of 1930s pulp, Raymond Chandler's reputation has outstripped Dashiell Hammett's, and rightfully so; Hammett was an outstanding technician and a keen drawer of character, but he lacked Chandler's transcendent style, his keen psychological insight, and his stunning sense of place and time. Still, he shared with Philip Marlowe's creator a love of language, and he was by far Chandler's superior in terms of complex, inventive plot, which made his books natural fodder for movie adaptations.

In his finest book, The Maltese Falcon, he combined this exquisite sensibility for clockwork plots with some of his most sinister and intriguing characters (the pathological lying femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the effete and manipulative thief Joel Cairo and the gregarious but sinister crime boss Kaspar Gutman), who he sent off in search of cinema's most memorable MacGuffin. Against them all he set the coolest, most calculating private eye in all of literature: the immortal Sam Spade. Much like its spiritual twin, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, despite a number of divergences from its source, achieves near-perfection and serves as an unforgettable 1941 movie adaptation that makes you appreciate the finer qualities of the novel all the more.

WHAT IT HAD: John Huston, one of the greatest directors of his era and the man who is far more responsible than either Humphrey Bogart or Dashiell Hammett for the film's success. Huston adapted the screenplay himself, stripping the story to its most raw elements, losing as little as possible while streamlining for the screen and keeping Hammett's understated, cooly cruel dialogue intact. An amazing cast with not a flat performance in the bunch -- aside from Bogart's iconic performance, Mary Astor gives the role of a lifetime as Brigid, Elisha Cook Jr. plays nicely against type as the furious gunsel Wilmer, Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo is endlessly entertaining, and Sydney Greenstreet's Kaspar Gutman is simply one of the best screen villains of all time.

WHAT IT LACKED: Very little. Thanks to Huston's top-notch direction and wonderful sense of timing, the parts of the novel which are left out are hard to miss, and the dialogue is so well-translated to the screen that you don't too much lament the loss of Hammett's fine style (as when he describes Spade, early on, as "rather pleasantly like a blond Satan"). Bits of exposition are left behind to no great loss, as well. Perhaps the major difference between book and movie can be chalked up to the Hays Code: censors of the day wouldn't allow Joel Cairo to be portrayed on film as he is in the book as obviously homosexual, and the book is far more violent than the film -- scenes where Gutman tortures his own daughter and is himself ultimately murdered by the betrayed henchman Wilmer Cook are deleted.

DID IT SUCCEED?: Both the book and the film are nearly perfect examples of their kind. Ironically, at the time the movie -- a huge critical success, then and now -- was made, the author of the the novel, Dashiell Hammett, was not taken very seriously. At the time, almost all pulp writers were considered low-rent hacks cranking out peurile entertainment for the masses. The movie, however -- which featured a screenplay by John Huston that mirrored the plot and dialogue of the novel almost exactly -- was hugely praised by critics both highbrow and popular. In fact, Huston received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, while Hammett would wait some 30 years (a decade after his death) to receive a serious reappraisal by literary critics.

The Screengrab : sydney greenstreet

Summer of ’78: “The Cheap Detective”

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE MALTESE FALCON