Word: shamuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THIS, MAYBE, is the latest incarnation of the American private i., aged past the primed '40s and sagging benignly into dotage, yielding his sleek hide and tough aspect to crowsfeet and innocence. Transplanted from the big bad city and the crass apparatus called technology, the shamus is hiding out in Cape Cod, cloaked as a gracefully-aging police chief who abhors modern development...
Fatal Accident. The adolescent here is a runaway heiress (Melanie Griffith, daughter of Actress Tippi Hedren) whose obviously devious mother hires the shamus to find her. The search introduces him to plenty of colorful company, notably a movie stunt man, before he finds the girl holed up with a shabby stepfather and his mistress (Jennifer Warren) on the Florida Keys, where they manage a dubious-looking sea and air charter service. A traumatizing accident-or is it murder?-shocks the girl into docility and a return home where, doing extra work in a movie, she herself suffers a fatal accident...
...Cartwright, move over. NBC'S Columbo, the disheveled shamus portrayed by Peter Folk, has joined ranks with Bonanza and I Love Lucy reruns as one of America's top TV exports. Now shown in 75 countries, the series has just been voted Japan's most popular television show in a poll conducted by the Japanese TV Guide. Falk's international success has not come smoothly, however. When Rumania's state TV network ran out of shows, fans of the raincoated detective began to protest, and the beleaguered network cabled Universal Studios for temporary relief. Said...
...novel owes its title partly to a blistering chili pepper sauce. It marks the return of an earlier Reed hero, Papa LaBas, the great black shamus. To white readers, he is soul's answer to Sherlock Holmes. To Reed, he is torchkeeper of "HooDoo," the 19th century AfroAmerican folk religion and business that dealt in magic cures, spells and charms...
...that there have been certain disadvantages. "There are two ways up the ladder-hand over hand or scratching and clawing. It's sure been tough on my nails." It has also been taxing on his social energies. After Easy Rider, Pal Harry Gittes (after whom Chinatown's shamus was named) remembers Nicholson buttonholing people if he got a look of even tentative recognition, "introducing himself and making himself unforgettable, one person at a time." Last year at Cannes he was observed doing similar gladhanding because he wanted to win the best-actor award for The Last Detail...