Word: fletch
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...winner is something as automatic as a Steven Spielberg special (last year he produced Back to the Future and The Goonies), a Sylvester Stallone sequel (Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV) or a comedy from Saturday Night Live alumni (this year's three Chevy Chase films, Fletch, National Lampoon's European Vacation and Spies Like Us, were among the dozen top grossers). As Screenwriter Robert Kaufman notes, "The studios know that one week of Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd walking into walls in Spies Like Us will gross as much as Woody Allen's The Purple Rose...
...Since Fletch writes his column under yet another pseudonym and repeatedly states his loathing for his first name, a shrink might assume that he has something of an identity problem. And since he likes to visualize himself sporting an Afro haircut and helping Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lead the Lakers to N.B.A. glory, the evidence seems to support that theory. But a couch, unless it is shared by a blond as attractive as Dana Wheeler-Nicholson -- playing a distressed damsel he rescues -- is the last place any sensible person would want to find him languishing. Much better for himself...
...that is very ingratiating. He falls about a bit in his patented manner, but basically he keeps surprising ) with the competence that lies just beneath his disarming air of distractedness. In the classic dramas of private investigation, the cheeky quip is the tough guy's challenge to toughness. In Fletch the quick, smartly paced gags somehow read as signs of vulnerability. Incidentally, they add greatly to the movie's suspense. Every minute you expect the hero's loose lip to be turned into...
While this gambit refreshes one basic convention, Fletch hews very closely to another. As Philip Marlowe and his heirs have delighted in showing us for the past half-century or so, corruption, especially in the greater Los Angeles area, knows no class distinctions. Start working on what looks like a scruffy street crime and one of the threads you find yourself tugging on is bound to lead to the very top of the social order. That is just fine with Director Ritchie, whose best work (Smile, The Bad News Bears) is acutely observant of manners and morals on every rung...
Mystery writers are especially prone to follow an exceptional early work with loads of lesser stories. Ellery Queen's later books, or, more recently, the sorry sequels Gregory Mcdonald wrote for Fletch, show writers struggling to regain the spark they had the first time around...