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Actors: Peter Falk, Louise Fletcher, Fernando Lamas, Ann-Margret, Sid Caesar, John Houseman, Marsha Mason
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| Review Summary and Plot Commentary about The Cheap Detective |
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In 1978, two years after "Murder By Death," the same team of writer Neil Simon and director Robert Moore served up this parody of hard-boiled 1940s detective movies. The year is 1939, the place San Francisco. The partner of private eye Lou Peckinpaugh (Falk) has been found shot dead with five innocent bystanders in a hotel. Lou has been having an affair with his partner's wife Georgia (Mason), which complicates the case. Then his great love from the days in Paris, Marlene DuChard (Fletcher), shows up with her husband Paul (Lamas) of the French Resistance. They're on the run from the Nazis and hoping to open a two-star French restaurant in Oakland -- if Paul can get the right papers. (This is the "Casablanca" plotline.) Also, slimy Pepe Damascus (Dom DeLuise) puts Peckinpaugh on the trail of a necklace made of egg-sized, 765-carat diamonds, which brings our hero in contact with Jasper Blubber (Houseman, doing a wonderful parody of the Sydney Greenstreet role in "The Maltese Falcon"). Fans will also recognize lines and scenes from "To Have and Have Not," "The Big Sleep," and even "Chinatown." There are scores of other keen performances, especially Ann-Margret jiggling and flirting outrageously as the young wife of millionaire architect Ezra C. Mildew Desire, Jr. (Caesar), Madeline Kahn as a mysterious client with a dozen different names, Channing as Peckinpaugh's fawning secretary, Nicol Williamson as the dangerous Nazi Colonel Schlissel, and more. The film starts slow, but has a great scene between Falk and Fletcher midway, a bracingly tasteless scene with Falk and Mason and an urn full of his dead partner's ashes, and a terrific finish at the Oakland ferry. A real hoot!
--David Loftus, Resident Scholar
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| Analysis of The Cheap Detective |
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Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot
Comedy, primarily
Yes
Time/era of movie:
- 1930's-1950's
Kind of comedy
- bungling cops/detectives
Main Character
Identity:
- Male
Profession/status:
- private investigator
Age:
- 40's-50's
Eccentric:
Yes
- eccentric
Hair color?
- brunette (Black)
Hair type
- (man) short/standard straight
Events of movie makes character more...
- happy
Ethnicity/Nationality
- White (American)
How sensitive is this character?
- middling sensitive to others' feelings
Sense of humor?
- Cynical sense of humor
Intelligence
- Average intelligence
Physique
- average physique
Secondary Main Character
Identity:
- Female
How much in movie?
- 60%
Ethnicity/Nationality
- White (American)
Main Adversary
Identity:
- Male
Age:
- 40's-50's
Eccentric:
Yes
- eccentric
How much of work is main antagonist actually present in:
- 40%
Ethnicity/Nationality
- German
How sensitive is this character?
- hard edged
Sense of humor
- Mostly serious with occasional humor
Intelligence
- Average intelligence
Physique
- average physique
Setting
United States
Yes
The US:
- California
City?
Yes
City:
- dangerous
- San Francisco
Misc setting
- fancy mansion
- bar
Style
Accounts of torture and death?
- moderately detailed references to deaths
Movie makes you feel...
- full of laughter
Sex/nudity in movie?
Yes
What kind of sex:
- vague references only
- kissing
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Note: the views expressed here are only those of the reviewer(s). | |
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