It was the 1970s, in my humble opinioniation that marked the golden age of the televisual 'tec and when it came to the sister silvers, those same Seventies produced some none too shabby pastiches of the private-eye persuasion; plausibly a sign of how dissolute the moral assumptions of the straightforward variety had become.
Stephen Frears' gritty, guffaw-inducing Gumshoe, starring Albert Finney as a local comedian, besotted with Bogie, whose life imitates art and is soon involved in Chandleresque action and hard-boiled hijinks all the way from Liverpool to London. In David Giler's The Black Bird (1975), George Segal played the son of San Francisco super-sleuth Sam Spade ( with the same comical elan a few years prior as Ruth Gordon's boy in Where's Poppa), resident hero of The Maltese Falcon. Robert Benton's The Late Show (1977) had Art Carney dials M himself as private investigator of pensionable vintage, replete with a hearing-aid which he must remove every time he fires his pistol , getting embroiled in a contemporary maddening world of marijuana, murder and mayhem. Most satisfying of all was undoubtedly Richard Dreyfuss' portrayal of a clapped-out Marxist gumshoe (as one of the characters lovingly refers to him ) in Jeremy Paul Kagan's The Big Fix (1978). A former college radical of the 1960s turned hapless hawkshaw, he pursues a complex web of political corruption, dragging in tow his Jewish mama and two small children - his ex-wife dumps them on him as she follows the latest psychotherapy fads.
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| Who's who is in this who's on first base whodunit- Simon's murderously funny Murder by Death |
Robert Moore's star-studded Murder by Death, boasted another apt script by wunderkind of wunderkinds, Neil Simon and was a convivial send-up of the entire detective genre, each of the cast expertly portraying the screen's best known snoops, in the traditional setting of a holiday house weekend. The partnership of Neil Simon and Robert Moore attempted to repeat the success of Murder by Death by lampooning the gumshoe genre in The Cheap Detective, starring the hardest working man in raincoat business - Peter Falk. Like the previously mentioned hits. these films were testament that the detective genre was still very much alive and kicking, although now largely in the form of pastiche or nostalgic tribute.
