Word: hickey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is little sense but much of interest in this quirkish thriller about a couple of Los Angeles gumshoes on their uppers. Al Hickey (Bill Cosby) and Frank Boggs (Robert Culp) are two private eyes who look as if they just got pulled out of a lineup. Their office is off a parking lot behind Hollywood Boulevard, although you'd have a better chance of finding them at the bar down the street, last two stools...
...Frank are hired by a limp-wristed shyster to locate his girl friend. "A switch-hitting sweet lips?" Boggs inquires skeptically, but he doesn't press the matter. He and Hickey need the $200 a day. The investigation becomes progressively messier, involving counterfeiters, fences, torpedoes and other citizens of the Southern California underworld...
...first feature film, disdains coherence in favor of establishing a seedy L.A. milieu, which he does so well that the frenzied illogic of the narrative is almost forgotten. Chili-dog stands, musty apartments atrophied since the 1920s, labyrinthine ranch houses perched on the edge of cracking cliffs, all give Hickey and Boggs a fine, evocative sense of a seamy city rotting in the sunshine...
Boggs, divorced from his, occasionally picks up hookers of indeterminate gender. Once in a while these characterizations swerve close to caricature, like the movie itself. But Hickey and Boggs is one of those weird, not wholly successful genre films that, for their general vigor and many individual virtues, end up being a great deal more engaging than the typical big-budget Hollywood behemoth...
...seedy derelicts: a strident middle-aged beautician (Helena Carroll) who rarely bathes and whose trailer shack-up is a monosyllabic semi-Neanderthal (Brad Sullivan); a red-headed hooker (Cherry Davis) whose hand is on every man's groin except that of her woefully plastered boy friend (William Hickey); a drunken doctor (David Hooks) who kills when he aborts and a sardonically nihilistic homosexual (Alan Mixon). The world casts stones; Williams applies the balm of compassion to the bruises. In his eyes and under his poetic alchemy, these people become the embodiment of the fears that course through...