Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Flagrante Delicto. Not any longer. Lancelot changes overnight from a catatonic lush into a quixotic detective. Proving Margot's waywardness is the least of his worries; her suspected lover is the director of a Hollywood film crew currently making a movie at Lancelot's picturesque mansion. With unlimited funds and the help of a black M.I.T. student who is an electronics wizard, Lancelot has no trouble assembling incriminating video tapes. But he wants more than to film Margot flagrante delicto. Lancelot is on the trail of evil and an affirmation that it still has meaning. Says...
...symphony of Dostoyevskian experiences on a kazoo: "Did you know that the South and for all I know the entire U.S.A. is full of demonic women who, driven by as yet unnamed furies, are desperately restoring and preserving places, buildings?" He tosses off witty remarks about the vacuities of Hollywood and about the strange things that occur when the film crew sets up in his town: "What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions...
There is also the matter of the plot, but you'll have to check that out for yourself. Let's just say that The Late Show has much of the style of some of the great Hollywood shamus movies. Benton borrows quite a bit, most notably a could-be corpse in the bathroom sequence from The Conversation and a manic chase scene from a long line of films. But he steals with style, and this movie has what these detective stories always required: laughs, suspense and the romantic angle. In this business these days, what looks like a bulging...
...ship's blue-blooded survivors, and the big newspaper magnates obligingly fed them improbable tales of white-tie-and-tails lifeboat heroism. The name Titanic acquired a musical aura, a smokey, well-monied air of drama and romance that later sold countless books and a pair of slick Hollywood tearjerkers to an easily-impressed public. A chance meeting between an iceberg and a ship's hull one chilly night in the North Atlantic thus made more than a few fortunes for quick-moving authors and editors--the right people soon found they could make a lot of money...
...least that's what the post-Watergate flurry of indictments, CIA bugs hidden in chandeliers, and James Q. Wilson seem to be saying. And everyone involved in the Patty Hearst case except F. Lee Bailey would agree. But an alternative tradition of the likeable, triumphant crook has evolved in Hollywood, and Ted Kotcheff's Fun with Dick and Jane is an heir to this genre...