Powerful

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Most reviews and the summary here list two films - but THE BIG SLEEP also gets a turn-over in this one. So add that fact to your list. I like this one, far better than the previous MURDER BY DEATH which Peter Sellers hated BTW. The HUGE cast is flawless and they play it all straight. Plus as a cinema buff, watch the photography. THE MALTESE FALCON scenes are cut straight, to the point, quickly and sometimes do not match. The CASABLANCA scenes (like the movie) are smooth flowing, the camera moving around the club. This is a film made by people who love old movies. Falk was at home in this role too. Some jokes by Simon are writ-large and others just subtle - such as when Falk just takes a Martini out of his desk drawer (it was there all the time for a rainy day) and gives it to Alma Chalmers, Denise Manderly, NO-CARMEN MONTENEGRO. Not a great comedy but one to curl up with and smile and remember too that there are not waters in CASABLANCA. ("I was misinformed"). Oh, and take the Martini out of the cupboard - chill it and enjoy.

It's 1939 in fictitious city of San Francisco. Lou Peckinpaugh (Peter Falk) is a private detective whose partner Floyd is killed in a mass shooting. He is immediately the prime suspect for having a fling with Floyd's wife Georgia Merkle (Marsha Mason). He gets a call from the mysterious Denise Montenegro and various other names (Madeline Kahn). He gets a different call from Pepe Damascus (Dom DeLuise) leading to a Casablanca-like club where Betty DeBoop (Eileen Brennan) is singing. Pepe wants to hire him to find an object. Paul (Fernando Lamas) and Marlene DuChard (Louise Fletcher) are hounded freedom fighters who insist on starting a 2 star french restaurant in Oakland.The Neil Simon dialog is so sharp that it goes in a loop. He's trying to spoof various noir movies by making the characters weirder. However he's not able to nail the jokes. It's not his style to do the ridiculous spoofs. These jokes don't make one laugh as much as one understands them intellectually. There are also a lot of great actors in this and most of them are not natural comedians. It doesn't work.

I was drawn to this movie because the TV guide listed Peter Falk and Ann-Margret as the stars. My only disappointment was that Ann-Margret's character didn't make an appearance until well past the half-way point in the movie, but at her mid- to late-30s she is in superb form.I like this movie greatly, but for a reason most would not guess. It is the cast, with Falk, Ann-Margret, Eileen Brennan, Sid Ceasar, Stockard Channing, Dom DeLuise, John Houseman, Madeline Kahn, Fernando Lamas, Marsha Mason, Phil Silvers, Abe Vigoda, Paul Williams, James Cromwell, Scatman Crothers, David Ogden Stiers, Vic Tayback, and Louise Fletcher, just a couple of years after her memorable role as Nurse Ratched in "One Flew Over". All names I enjoyed on TV and in the movies during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It was a blast down memory lane seeing all of them in this movie.Peter Falk is Private Eye Lou Peckinpaugh, who gets investigated early for the murder of his partner. Of course he is not guilty and the thread of a story is to find out who did it, and also to recover some very large diamonds that went missing some years earlier. And to end up on a foggy night at the wharf, where someone with papers will be boarding a ship.Set in 1940s San Francisco, the absurd titles introducing the story makes the point that San Francisco is 7000 miles from Casablanca. But that is meaningful in that much of the story is a sort of parody of the movie, "Casablanca" where Rick plays an American helping his former lover and her husband get papers to leave. In this movie many of the scenes take place in a piano bar, very much like the one Rick owned in Casablanca, even with a black piano player. As the detective, Lou speaks in a style and cadence that sound very much like Bogart in his various detective roles. At other times he sounds just like Columbo, the character of Falk's TV series.The actual story is secondary, the fun here is the snappy and absurdly funny dialog. It makes me wonder if the "Scary Movie" series of flicks was inspired by this one, "The Cheap Detective."

I remember as a kid when this came out the critics called it a flop. After seeing it so many years later, I think that the critics didn't get it. The humor was very subtle. You can to understand the detective/thriller genres of the 40s, most notably Casablanca. Like in Airplane, the humor comes so fast that you may miss it. Peter Falk is funny, if unusually subdued, in portraying a bumbling detective trying to solve a mystery that is in itself completely silly and inane. I thought the Casablanca parody scenes were hilarious. There were hilarious movies, like when he tells the piano player (Scatman Crothers) "Don't play it, Sam". Or when Louise Fletcher goes into a patriotic rant to which the Nazi officer says that she 'is beautiful and amazing, and yet an absolute bore'. Sid Caesar has a nearly wordless role, yet his goofy and demented look is comic brilliance at it's best. All in all, it is a funny spoof poking fun of the black and white mystery/detective films of the 40s. Perhaps the most funny thing was the beginning credits, that say 'there is a war going on, but this movie is set in San Francisco, thousands of miles from Casablanca, and has nothing to do with the war effort'.