Word: shamus
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...Late Show. Art Carney trudges through the role of washed- up shamus Ira Wells, opposite Lily Tomlin's hippy-dippy hippy, who hires Wells to find her cat and leads them both into a big mess of a sinister inbroglio. 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-obsessed Tomlin. With the same L.A. backdrop that the great Chandler stories grew out of, this one proves as well-oiled...
...down-at-the-heels private eye named Russel Wren is suddenly victimized by a series of increasingly vigorous beatings. Someone, perhaps everyone, is out to get him, and Wren naturally wants to find out why. One good reason may be his mouth. A former college English teacher, the shamus speaks in Victorian grandiloquent, and the burden of his remarks is composed of snippets from the Great Books and library paste. Wren cannot even make a kinky pass at his secretary without providing footnotes: "Dante finds Beatrice in heaven, on one side of the Lord, with none other than the Virgin...
Irwin Blye will never be mistaken for Philip Marlowe: he is handmaiden to the nation's lawyers, a shrewd middleman in America's judicial process. His assignments, almost always from attorneys, involve collecting evidence that is presentable and persuasive in court. The highest praise for the shamus comes from a lawyer feared in settlement circles as a "matrimonial bomber": "Irwin Blye puts things together. He knows the law." He also knows civil liberties and how to abuse them. To him information is power. His weapons are things like UCC-11 forms (for $3 you get everything on anyone...
...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...
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...