Word: carneys
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...calmed down a bit and the three strolled over the superette for a can of soda. Inside, the usual crowd of truckdrivers was standing around mumbling strange things to the owner, a short Greek who wore sunglasses even when it rainzd and who smiled like Art Carney. The first thing Mrs. Jou noticed was that the truckers were all standing by the magazine rack, taking in the heavy-duty porno mags. The first thing Carlo noticed was the de luxe C.B. next to the rack into which one of the truckers was reading an excerpt from the Hustler letters column...
...owner greeted them with a full blast of Art Carney and C.B. talk: "Ten-four there, good buddies, can I help you? For sure, it's a hot one there...
...Late Show. Art Carney trudges through the role of washed-up shamus Ira Wells, opposite Lily Tomlin's hippydippy hippy, who hires Wells to find her cat and leads them both into a big mess of a sinister imbroglio. Robert Benton, screenwriter and director, does a lot of borrowing, from both classic and more recent detective flicks, but does his cribbing in style. The actors, meanwhile, are heavily, and affectingly, into themselves: particularly the kharma and vibrations-obssessed Tomlin. With the same L.A. backdrop that the great Chandler stories grew out of, this one proves as well-oiled...
...this comes by way of introduction to the character of Ira Welles, the aging, washed-up private eye that Art Carney plays in The Late Show. Welles isn't a total Marlowe facsimile, but he comes close. The circumstantial evidence is certainly there in the 25 bills Welles demands for fee and in the way he gets huffy when anyone suggests that he might be playing his game any way but straight. Even his affection for his sloppy $5-a-week room rings a bell; "it may not seem like much to you," he tells visitors in a defensive apology...
...Carney and Tomlin elevate it. Carney may forever carry around like some prominent and embarassing tattoo his association with the hyper, dim-witted character of Ed in The Honeymooners. But here, like in Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto, he sheds that goofball image for a gritty grand-fatherliness. Tomlin is Tomlin, meanwhile: sensitive, talkative and--with all her blather about vibrations and kharmas--very, very funny. Yet what makes their two characters engaging and moving is the way they work together. If not a natural team, they both have become real pros and know how to make the audience...